Embodied gestures

This is a book about musical gestures: multiple ways to design instruments, compose musical performances, analyze sound objects and represent sonic ideas through the central notion of ‘gesture’. The writers share knowledge on major research projects, musical compositions and methodological tools developed among different disciplines, such as sound art, embodied music cognition, human-computer interaction, performative studies and artificial intelligence. They visualize how similar and compatible are the notions of embodied music cognition and the artistic discourses proposed by musicians working with ‘gesture’ as their compositional material. The authors and editors hope to contribute to the ongoing discussion around creative technologies and music, expressive musical interface design, the debate around the use of AI technology in music practice, as well as presenting a new way of thinking about musical instruments, composing and performing with them

Listeners’ Bodies in Music Analysis: Gestures, Motor Intentionality, and Models

In this article I demonstrate how listeners understand musical processes with their bodies, and how their gestures can be used to build analytical models. Specifically, I draw on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue that situated, active listeners project their motor intentional gestures inside music, where they reconstitute the very nature of musical space and its objects according to their own unique perspective. Rather than passively reflecting gestures of performers, these listeners use their own bodily states to create the structure and meaning of music. I illustrate how those states can be mobilized for analysis by taking quantifiable features of gestures—acceleration and temporal profiles—as models of musical structure, and by using those models as a basis for analytical narratives. I focus on three pieces—Olga Neuwirth’s Vampyrotheone, Elliott Carter’s ASKO Concerto, and Thomas Adès’s Living Toys—in which motion-capture studies revealed the different roles of listeners’ gestures in organizing musical experience

Embodied gestures

This is a book about musical gestures: multiple ways to design instruments, compose musical performances, analyze sound objects and represent sonic ideas through the central notion of ‘gesture’. The writers share knowledge on major research projects, musical compositions and methodological tools developed among different disciplines, such as sound art, embodied music cognition, human-computer interaction, performative studies and artificial intelligence. They visualize how similar and compatible are the notions of embodied music cognition and the artistic discourses proposed by musicians working with ‘gesture’ as their compositional material. The authors and editors hope to contribute to the ongoing discussion around creative technologies and music, expressive musical interface design, the debate around the use of AI technology in music practice, as well as presenting a new way of thinking about musical instruments, composing and performing with them

Practice led research into stream-form composition methods, freeassociation, and synaesthesia in audio/visual compostion.

.haul / S is a portfolio of audio/visual works, all with a common start point, synaesthesia: a powerful and highly personal phenomenon. In this portfolio I examine my own synaesthetic perceptions of sound and image, and how they direct my compositional decisions and aesthetic tastes. These perceptions, and the resulting compositions, are compared to the experiences of synaesthete composers, and their goals in composing from such an abstract source material, as well as synaesthetes not engaged in musical endeavours. In doing so, I speculate how the act of making from such personal, abstract, and ultimately indescribable and unsharable experiences affects an audience’s reception of the pieces produced. As such, I produce works that are as close to being about nothing as I could posit: pieces that feature no defined subject, theme, or narrative, outside of their constituent parts. This nothingness, or lack of concrete reference is speculative, aiming to open discussion on perception and synaesthesia (which I do not consider a special condition only experienced by few), and strives to inform further work actively influenced by this composer/audience feedback loop. The compositions in this portfolio are also the result of practice-led research into stream form composition methods, and examinations of free-association in audio/visual composition. The aim of this research is to open discussion on intuitive composition practices, and composers’ aesthetic judgments and decisions when producing a work. It also examines synaesthesia as a compositional tool, as a means of suggesting further research in a field which is still poorly understood

Advancing performability in playable media : a simulation-based interface as a dynamic score

When designing playable media with non-game orientation, alternative play scenarios to gameplay scenarios must be accompanied by alternative mechanics to game mechanics. Problems of designing playable media with non-game orientation are stated as the problems of designing a platform for creative explorations and creative expressions. For such design problems, two requirements are articulated: 1) play state transitions must be dynamic in non-trivial ways in order to achieve a significant level of engagement, and 2) pathways for players’ experience from exploration to expression must be provided. The transformative pathway from creative exploration to creative expression is analogous to pathways for game players’ skill acquisition in gameplay. The paper first describes a concept of simulation-based interface, and then binds that concept with the concept of dynamic score. The former partially accounts for the first requirement, the latter the second requirement. The paper describes the prototype and realization of the two concepts’ binding. “Score” is here defined as a representation of cue organization through a transmodal abstraction. A simulation based interface is presented with swarm mechanics and its function as a dynamic score is demonstrated with an interactive musical composition and performance

SoundCloud, Sampling and Sonic Experimentation: Knowledge Transmission in Hip-Hop’s Underground

This thesis examines the roles of human and nonhuman actors in the transmission of knowledge in experimental hip-hop. What I call ‘experimental hip-hop’ emerged with a number of musical innovators, mostly based in Los Angeles, and has since spread globally, including to London, the main site of my investigations. The musicians who make this music are usually termed ‘producers’ or ‘beatmakers’, and they employ their laptops along with other instruments and music technologies to create their compositions, usually in bedroom studios. While this style has much in common with more traditional forms of hip-hop, producers have increasingly released instrumental pieces as compositions in their own right (rather than as backing tracks for rappers and MCs), and focused on creating different kinds of musical complexity. Producers deploy an array of innovative practices alongside more traditional ones, such as sampling. Drawing on a richly varied methodology, including long-form semi-structured interviews, participant observation of studio practices, and an examination of the creation of pre-composed musical materials, I analyse the role of human and non- human actors in the ways knowledge is transmitted. It is worth noting at this point that this thesis is a study of musical and technical knowledge rather than a number of forms of knowledge examined in Afrodiasporic and post-colonial scholarship. Throughout I argue that producers learn from both technologies and their peers, and that this approach to learning seems distinct from the kinds of formal and informal teacher- student relationships that exist in other forms of music making. This means that the musicians I study must not only be formidable autodidacts, but also able to build strong bonds with other producers to help them to help them vie for distinction in a musical landscape in which particular forms of compositional complexity are highly valued

Effort in gestural interactions with imaginary objects in Hindustani Dhrupad vocal music

Physical effort has often been regarded as a key factor of expressivity in music performance. Nevertheless, systematic experimental approaches to the subject have been rare. In North Indian classical (Hindustani) vocal music, singers often engage with melodic ideas during improvisation by manipulating intangible, imaginary objects with their hands, such as through stretching, pulling, pushing, throwing etc. The above observation suggests that some patterns of change in acoustic features allude to interactions that real objects through their physical properties can afford. The present study reports on the exploration of the relationships between movement and sound by accounting for the physical effort that such interactions require in the Dhrupad genre of Hindustani vocal improvisation. The work follows a mixed methodological approach, combining qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse interviews, audio-visual material and movement data. Findings indicate that despite the flexibility in the way a Dhrupad vocalist might use his/her hands while singing, there is a certain degree of consistency by which performers associate effort levels with melody and types of gestural interactions with imaginary objects. However, different schemes of cross-modal associations are revealed for the vocalists analysed, that depend on the pitch space organisation of each particular melodic mode (rāga), the mechanical requirements of voice production, the macro-structure of the ālāp improvisation and morphological cross-domain analogies. Results further suggest that a good part of the variance in both physical effort and gesture type can be explained through a small set of sound and movement features. Based on the findings, I argue that gesturing in Dhrupad singing is guided by: the know-how of humans in interacting with and exerting effort on real objects of the environment, the movement–sound relationships transmitted from teacher to student in the oral music training context and the mechanical demands of vocalisation