Hi Johannes,
> Hi > fascinating work Marco, and enjoyed seeing you demonstrate it at CYNETarts > and in London when we met; > > here the work you posted (called sound sculpture) > again raises interesting questions for me that I am not sure how to > formulate; > performance wise and presentationally (lighting) the focus is placed on > hands, but it's the > muscles and arms that also are factors (c an' t see the sensors/wiring), > perhaps > hands are at outer perimeter of the flexed muscles of whole arms / lower > arms your sensors sense, > and perhaps you do perform with a whole "circuitry" / Visceral circuitry > emergent body > as you say, or not? but how does the "whole" become performed-embodied > into the sound (and our > image of hands clasping)? > There are at least three layers composing the staging of the performance. They are entangled with one another, without hierarchy. The first is the metaphorical layer. The "hands holding the void" (ref. to Alberto Giacometti's sculpture of the same name) are the metaphorical means bearing the imagery of the work. At first, it seems I'm sculpting an empty space, but as the performance unfolds, the sound forms reveal the physical qualities of the invisible object. It is a perceptual illusion. The second layer is the physical/sonic gestures and the lighting playing along with them. The gesture vocabulary is designed to embody the metaphor above, and, at the same time, to produce given muscular sounds. The lighting focus on the hands is meant to outline an imagery shape of the sonic energy that my body is trying to contain. When I close and open my hands the vertical ray of light is blocked or spread in the space. In so doing, it illuminates differently the audience member's bodies, as if there was an actual physical and luminous object in my hands, exploding and imploding gesture after gesture. The third layer is the body/machine coupling, that is, the performance of my body through the computational system, the Xth Sense. It is a feedback loop process of mediation that starts when I modulate visceral processes within my body through physical effort, torsions, and whole-body movements to produce specific bioacoustic sounds. Those sounds yield unique features that the sensing software extracts. According to the features of the muscle movement, I modulate the processing of the bioacoustic sounds. What is heard during the concert, is at the same time, the raw muscle sound diffused by the subwoofers, and the digitally processed muscle sound diffused by the rest of the loudspeakers. I produce and modulate a visceral sound, process it through the computational system, listen to the result and modulate it once again. It is a perceptual feedback loop. > -- I also felt there was a range of sound that obviously flows changes > flowing through your patch > (software) and not through your body/only from body, i.e. how does your > sound emerge > from body except metaphorically? or is what we hear coming from "Xth > Sense" amplified muscle contractions -- > Perhaps I partly answered above. To elaborate further, the sounds literally emerge from the body. No metaphor involved here. What is heard is exclusively bioacoustic sounds from the human body, in both raw and processed form. Amplified raw muscle sounds and digitally processed muscle sounds become one sound form. > how does Xth Sense do that? I think asked you this before, so maybe > accept it please as a naive audience questions raised > Muscle sounds, and other visceral sounds, are very low frequency vibration of the flesh tissues. Think of the heartbeat. The heartbeat is the sound of the heart tissues that contract and expand. The Xth Sense captures those sounds using a tiny microphone. The sound is then fed to the computational system as an audio input. > in one's mind, how do you choose what sounds we hear (how is interactivity > per-formed?) and > how do the soundfiles n your laptop get processed/affected by your > muscular activity? are > there no soundfiles until the XttSense sends signals? > No, there is no pre-recorded soundfile, and no sound unless I move and produce one. All what is heard is produced in real time by the body. As described above, each physical gesture produces a different sound. Each sound yields given features. The features are used by the software to process the sound itself. And so the loop is closed and starts again. The question of how interactivity is performed is very interesting for me. Ominous is a quasi-improvised piece, that is, the only aspect of the performance that I define beforehand is how certain muscle movements will sound. However, I do not define static qualities of the sound interaction, but rather complex behaviours. To make an extremely simple example, imagine that with a quiet torsion of my wrist I increase a reverberation of the sound, and as soon as the wrist tension increases beyond a certain threshold an echo delay effect is activated and modulated. Building upon this method, one can perform in a playful and physical way complex sonic events. In Ominous, for instance, if I do not exert a certain amount of tension in my muscles, the sound will never "explode", as it does towards the end of the video. But once it does, there's no way to stop it nor make it quieter. I can only modulate it using intense muscle force, until my arms become too tired and the sound fades out. This is a constraint that I created on purpose to make the performance more challenging to play. it is an attempt to move beyond the idea of "control" over the technology. I wanted something that I couldn't control fully, an unstable instrument that could sound in unexpected ways. Performing interactivity is to me an exploratory practice. For each piece, I perform the body differently, according to tiredness, the food I ate, the room temperature, the stress, the excitement, and the sleep I had the night before. One concert might sound louder and more dynamic, another might sound quieter. The instrument affords for variety, difference, and also error and bad performance. best wishes, M > > regards > Johannes > -- Marco Donnarumma Performer, body tinkerer, teacher and writer. #soundandmusic #biotech #freeculture EAVI - Goldsmiths, University of London ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Portfolio: http://marcodonnarumma.com Research: http://res.marcodonnarumma.com
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