Body Music

On the visceral engagement of the body in musical performance, and how technological mediation can foster, or break, forms of audience empathy.

Body Music: Phenomenologies of Sonic Gesture is a musician’s account of the relationship between corporeal movement and musical sound. It examines the conscious and subconscious strategies behind musical expression, and ways in which sound and gesture become the medium of intersubjectivity with the spectator. It looks at the design of technologies that break out of the binary brittleness of the digital to capture subtleties of human movement to create expressive digital musical instrument systems. Drawing from the overlapping fields of phenomenological philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and post-humanist anthropology, the book unwraps the performer as materially and digitally entangled with the sonic. Body Music joins a growing literature in music and gesture and embodied music cognition and responds to challenges posed by the “performative turn” in music theory and aesthetics. It connects these insights with fields of cognitive science and embodied human-computer interaction (HCI) to offer a performer-centric approach to developing new sonic technologies. This becomes then a humanistic response to the challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Theory and practice are interwoven, with vignettes describing seminal concert performances by musicians like Michel Waisvisz, Laetitia Sonami, and Elaine Mitchener. These stories, drawn from personal musical experience, on tour and in the concert hall, situate us in a musical life at the heart of experimental, avant-garde practice.