Informing musical structure through bodily knowledge - Composing with physical models

Musical communication, as any human communication, is based on a common, mostly tacit, knowledge shared among all parties involved. In the Western music tradition, typically these parties are the composers, the performers and the audience. Therefore composition will always have to operate with this shared knowledge in order to achieve expression.

The assumption of this project is that an essential part of this knowledge is bodily knowledge arising from our experience with the physical world.

Through modelling the physical processes on which our experience is based, the project will explore new ways to gain access to this knowledge and make it available to the compositonal process.

The central hypothesis of the project is that the dynamics resulting from a bodily interaction with those models may meaningfully inform the structure of a composition on different levels.

Exploring the various aspects of this hypothesis through artistic case studies is the central methodological appoach of the project. These case studies will confront dancers, instrumentalists or performers in general with the above mentioned dynamics while they are interacting with the physical models by means of motion tracking.

Sound is the direct result of this interaction and serves as the performers’ only feedback from the physical model. The dynamics represented in the temporal evolution of the sound, informs the meso and macro levels of a composition.

Performers and composers will asses and use their own embodied perception to discuss the qualities induced in the movement as well as in the sound production and in the composition. The main measurement instrument is thus the aesthetic experience of the involved parties and forms the basis for the judgement that will determine the future development.

The project is expected to yield three main results: (1) a set of case studies documenting the potential of informing musical structure through bodily knowledge

(2) a series of performed pieces arising from the case studies

(3) an open-source software modelling framework