The voice painter

Abstract

Very often when looking at a painting or touching a sculpture it is possible to experience the meaning of being a perceiver as enactor of perceptual content. The piece of art that we try to explore forces us to move around the object in order to discover new meanings and sensations. We need to interact with the artistic object in order to completely understand it. Is it possible to think about sound and music in this way? Is the auditory and musical experience prone to such investigation? This paper tries to describe an enactive system that, by merging the concepts of autographic and allographic arts, transforms the spectator of a multimodal performance into the performer--perceiver--enactor. The voice painter, an instrument to paint with our voice movement in a closed loop interaction, offers a new artistic metaphor as well as a potentially useful tool for speech therapy programs