How is performing with responsive technology in a mixed work experienced by performers, and how may the notion of embodied cognition further our understanding of this interaction? These questions are addressed here analysing accounts from singers performing the author’s mixed work Metamorphoses (2015). Combining semi-structured interviews and inspiration from Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, questions concerning the ‘self’ when listening, singing, moving and relating to fellow musicians, as well as the relationship towards the computer, are explored. The results include a notion of the computer as neither separated nor detached but both, and highlight the importance of the situation, including not only the here and now but also social and cultural dimensions. The discussion emphasises the role of sensorimotor interaction and bodily experience in human meaning-making.
The question motivating the work presented here, starting from a view of music as embodied and situated activity, is how can we account for the complexity of interactive music performance situations. These are situations in which human performers interact with responsive technologies, such as sensor-driven technology or sound synthesis affected by analysis of the performed sound signal. This requires investigating in detail the underlying mechanisms, but also providing a more holistic approach that does not lose track of the complex whole constituted by the interactions and relationships of composers, performers, audience, technologies, etc. The concept of affordances has frequently been invoked in musical research, which has seen a “bodily turn” in recent years, similar to the development of the embodied cognition approach in the cognitive sciences. We therefore begin by broadly delineating its usage in the cognitive sciences in general, and in music research in particular. We argue that what is still missing in the discourse on musical affordances is an encompassing theoretical framework incorporating the sociocultural dimensions that are fundamental to the situatedness and embodiment of interactive music performance and composition. We further argue that the cultural affordances framework, proposed by Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014) and recently articulated further by Ramstead et al. (2016) in this journal, although not previously applied to music, constitutes a promising starting point. It captures and elucidates this complex web of relationships in terms of shared landscapes and individual fields of affordances. We illustrate this with examples foremost from the first author's artistic work as composer and performer of interactive music. This sheds new light on musical composition as a process of construction—and embodied mental simulation—of situations, guiding the performers' and audience's attention in shifting fields of affordances. More generally, we believe that the theoretical perspectives and concrete examples discussed in this paper help to elucidate how situations—and with them affordances—are dynamically constructed through the interactions of various mechanisms as people engage in embodied and situated activity.
The body exists in space and time. It moves through cultural spaces and temporal rhythms. In the combination of instantiated actions and environmental conditions a context is created, this through embodiment. In this thesis I will attempt to link definitions of embodiment with the process of creating and performing new sound theatre works that involve live interaction with media technology. I will also examine terms such as inscription or incorporation and their application to processes of learning and memory within a particular context of inter-disciplinary skills. Finally, in the light of this genre, I will approach the problematic of analytical procedures that change the very parameters of embodied knowledge. The term sound theatre could be defined as a shift of play between music, image and text, incorporating elements such as gesture, choreography, audio and visual technology into a compositional dialogue. However this approach demands a reexamination of the spatial and temporal aspects involved in such inter-activity and their consequent relation to the performer. Taking the starting-point of sound and movement within the body of the performer, my research involves investigations into medial extensions of embodiment that have developed through a discourse with machines. This project takes an essentially practical basis for its research in the form of collaborations with musicians and practitioners of media technology towards a creative product. The result is a series of written compositions, each of which examines a different aspect of sound theatre. The valuable exchange that takes place during such a situation of experimentation becomes equally as important as the final product, providing much of the material framework for issues such as terminology and analytical procedures that concern my investigation.
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