To sing the body electric: Instruments and effort in the performance of electronic music

Abstract

Visualized emotion can be transmitted through minimal physical gestures in a musical performance; this process can be described as ‘sentic’, a term originally coined by Manfred Clynes in the 1970s during research into the effects of space travel. The development of alternate musical instruments from the 1960s up to the present day breaks the traditional musical paradigm of effort in performance. This development also shadows concepts of space exploration technology such as teleoperation. Musical instruments can be evaluated in terms of a new musical effort paradigm; a young generation seems content to accept that there may be no apparent correlation between input effort and sound output. This article explores what a contemporary notion of effort might be, inspired by a reading of Walt Whitman's poem ‘I Sing the Body Electric’.

Keywords:

• Effort
• Sentic
• Instruments
• Electronic Music
• Minimal

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Gianna Bouchard for her critical reading of initial portions of this text, and to Nick Collins whose good humor and knowledgeable insight were very helpful to me in writing this article.

Notes

[1] I am inclined to think that computer music lends itself more naturally to being listened to in a manner analogous to the way in which one views a work of visual art, thus obviating the need for a traditional performance. That the ‘honesty of tape music’ (Schloss, 2003) should be revisited (even if not exclusively) and not simply as an element for an installation, but as the object itself of auditory contemplation, in an acousmatic sense. It is not that I am ignoring the existence of the installation genre itself, but that I believe many works from the acousmatic music repertoire of the last few decades would be more at home in endless loops as part of sound installations in art galleries, as they could be, in fact, far more sonically interesting than most sound installations. Rather than attending concert hall performances of electroacoustic music and certain genres of electronica, perhaps we should be listening to the same pieces in art galleries, where listeners may wander, ponder and contemplate in silence, as invisible sound constructs traverse the space around us.

[2] Including, but not limited to, cyborgs in Ridley Scott's film Bladerunner (1982).

[3] It is interesting to note here that as well as being a scientist, Clynes was also a concert pianist.

[4] It would be interesting to find out whether Clynes was influential on the actual development of the computer mouse; after all, he was working in California in the 1960s and 1970s and it was during this time that the paradigm of a windows system with pointing and clicking and the use of a mouse was applied and further developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. In fact, the mouse itself was developed at the Stanford Research Institute in 1965, making California into a sort of sentic hub!

[5] In the case of Cage's music, this intention exists also in the listener. Although arguably it would suffice if intent resides only in the composer's mind.

[6] Because the fact that they may be used for music makes them pregnant with the intentionality of music and therefore musical.

[7] Although in fact, on the Theremin, intonation problems can be corrected ‘on the fly’ and potentially passed off as a portamento effect.

[8] This makes sense as the gaming industry is much more powerful than the electronic music community and therefore has more resources to develop new computer interfaces. Music software programmers can then utilize these controllers by writing plug-ins that can read USB ports and map the data received in a musically useful manner.