In this book, scholars and artists explore the relation between electronic music and bodily expression from perspectives including aesthetics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, dance and interactive performance arts, sociology, computer music and sonic arts, and music theory, transgressing disciplinary boundaries and established beliefs. The historic decoupling of action and sound generation might be seen to have distorted or even effaced the expressive body, with the retention of performance qualities via recoupling not equally retaining bodily expressivity. When, where, and what is the body expressed in electronic music then? The authors of this book reveal composers’, performers’, improvisers’ and listeners’ bodies, as well as the works’ and technologies’ figurative bodies as a rich source of expressive articulation. Bringing together humanities’ scholarship and musical arts contingent upon new media, the contributors offer inspiring thought and critical reflection for all those seriously engaged with the aesthetics of electronic music, interactive performance, and the body’s role in aesthetic experience and expression. Performativity is not only seen as being reclaimed in live electronic music, interactive arts, and installations; it is also exposed as embodied in the music and the listeners themselves.

This volume reveals the extent to which aural perception influences our spatial awareness. Spanning various fields and practices, from psychology to geography, and from zoology to urban planning, it covers a range of environments in which sounds contribute to forming our sense of space and place. The contributions gathered here lead from the mother’s womb, through the habitats of insects and owls, to the resonating bodies of buildings and the city, to artistic endeavours that aim to consciously reveal the spatiality of sound. In this progression, the book demonstrates the profoundly constitutive role of hearing and listening at all stages of our biological and social development, as well as the epistemological, phenomenological and emotional importance of sound in relation to our construction of space. As such, it will appeal not only to architects, town-planners and artists, but also to the growing community of scientists and scholars intrigued by sonic issues. Differing from both quantitative acoustics and sound design, its approach opens new perspectives on the sonic dimension and aural understanding of our environment by tracing analogies between a diversity of spaces formed when sound interacts with listening as a mode of attention.

Body and space refer to vital and interrelated dimensions in the experience of sounds and music. Sounds have an overwhelming impact on feelings of bodily presence and inform us about the space we experience. Even in situations where visual information is artificial or blurred, such as in virtual environments or certain genres of film and computer games, sounds may shape our perceptions and lead to surprising new experiences. This book discusses recent developments in a range of interdisciplinary fields, taking into account the rapidly changing ways of experiencing sounds and music, the consequences for how we engage with sonic events in daily life and the technological advancements that offer insights into state-of-the-art methods and future perspectives. Topics range from the pleasures of being locked into the beat of the music, perception–action coupling and bodily resonance, and affordances of musical instruments, to neural processing and cross-modal experiences of space and pitch. Applications of these findings are discussed for movement sonification, room acoustics, networked performance, and for the spatial coordination of movements in dance, computer gaming and interactive artistic installations.

Like race, gender, and sexuality, disability is a social and cultural construction. Music, musicians, and music-making simultaneously embody and shape representations and narratives of disability. Disability -- culturally stigmatized minds and bodies -- is one of the things that music in all times and places can be said to be about.

Body as Instrument explores how musicians interact with movement-controlled performance systems, producing sounds imbued with their individual physical signature. Using motion tracking technology, performers can translate physical actions into sonic processes, creating or adapting novel gestural systems that transcend the structures and constraints of conventional musical instruments. Interviews with influential artists in the field, Laetitia Sonami, Atau Tanaka, Pamela Z, Julie Wilson-Bokowiec, Lauren Sarah Hayes, Mark Coniglio, Garth Paine and The Bent Leather Band expose the transformational impact of motion sensors on musicians' body awareness and abilities. Coupled with reflection on author-composed works, the book analyses how the body as instrument metaphor informs relationships between performers, their bodies and self-designed instruments. It also examines the role of experiential design strategies in developing robust and nuanced gestural systems that mirror a performer's movement habits, preferences and skills, inspiring new physical forms of musical communication and diverse musical repertoire.

What does it mean to interact with sound? How does interactivity alter our experience as creators and listeners? What does the future hold for interactive musical and sonic experiences? This book answers these questions with newly-commissioned chapters that explore the full range of interactive audio in games, performance, design, and practice.

During the twentieth century, electronic technology enabled the explosive development of new tools for the production, performance, dissemination and conservation of music. The era of the mechanical reproduction of music has, rather ironically, opened up new perspectives, which have contributed to the revitalisation of the performer’s role and the concept of music as performance. This book examines questions related to music that cannot be set in conventional notation, reporting and reflecting on current research and creative practice primarily in live electronic music. It studies compositions for which the musical text is problematic, that is, non-existent, incomplete, insufficiently precise or transmitted in a nontraditional format. Thus, at the core of this project is an absence. The objects of study lack a reliably precise graphical representation of the work as the composer or the composer/performer conceived or imagined it. How do we compose, perform and study music that cannot be set in conventional notation? The authors of this book examine this problem from the complementary perspectives of the composer, the performer, the musical assistant, the audio engineer, the computer scientist and the musicologist.