In the 1950s, W. Ross Ashby published his book An Introduction to Cybernetics [Ashby, 1956], which presented structural transformations in a way that allows their description to be independent from their medium of implementation. At that time, the science of cybernetics, started by the work of mathematician Norbert Wiener [Wiener, 1950, 1954] and engineer Claude E. Shannon [Shannon, 1949], generated an enormous amount of interest due to the possibilities it offered with regard to devising a language for the analysis of systems that was independent of any one field. People from many disciplines were attracted to it: the anthropologist Margaret Mead, the biologist Heinz von Foerster, the mathematician John Neumann, the psychologist Gregory Bateson, and many others, all took part in the ``Macy'' conferences in the early 50s, and the subsequent founding of the American Society for Cybernetics [von Foerster, 1974, 1984].
In the 1970s, the composer Herbert Brün (who had been involved with compositional experimentation with technology since his work in the 1950s at the Cologne Radio Studios in West Germany), began work at the University of Illinois on his project SAWDUST, with the assistance of Gary Grossman, and later Jody Kravitz and Keith Johnson [Roads, 1985]. SAWDUST, originally written for the VAX 11/780 and then ported to a 386-PC , took its synthesis paradigm not from the mathematical models of Fourier synthesis, but the transformational ideas of cybernetics. SAWDUST allows for the specification of square waves, which are then subject to linear transformation from a specified initial to a specified final state. The program currently has five transformational algorithms: vary, turn, merge, mingle, and link.