Invisible performance and the virtuosic body

Abstract

This article outlines some ideas behind an ongoing series of compositions that explore the invisible performance of the body, the mind and the medium. The work began by modeling the performer's internal performance with sound software, biometric sensors and digital noise, and subsequently developed into a series of acoustic performance texts that address the subtleties of biological rhythm through simple musical actions. Both streams peer into the mundane in search of the invisibly dancing, virtuosic body, which in turn offers simple reminders of a mysterious world lying just beyond the brink of consciousness, engulfed by a pulsing island of person and politics.

Keywords:

• Invisible Performance
• Virtuosic Body
• Meditation
• Mediation
• Music Performance

Acknowledgements

Video, audio and scores for the works described above can be found online at: http://plus1plus1plus.org and are published by Sitting Breathing Publications (ASCAP). The performance scores will be printed by Fifth Planet Press in 2007 as a collection titled, i am sediment. I extend my sincerest gratitude to David Rosenboom, whose mentorship and support was immensely crucial in developing much of the technology used in the Medi[t]ations series, and whose music and writing has served both then and now as inspiration in my endeavors. This article is most humbly dedicated to him.

Notes

[1] ‘In discriminating against low-frequency sounds, the human ear conveniently filters out deep body sounds such as brainwaves and the movement of blood in our veins’ (Schafer, 1977, p. 207). The range of our hearing extends down to around 16 – 20 cycles per second (cps), below which sounds are greatly attenuated or silent to our ears. As Schafer implies, most of the periodic bodily functions occur at frequencies within the sub-audio range (heart rate: 1 – 2 cps; breath: <1 cps; brainwaves: 4 – 20 cps; blinks: <1 cps; and so on), and do not present themselves to us as sounds, but as rhythms that are further muted by the flesh.

[2] Allan Kaprow on his Happenings: ‘Doing life, consciously, was a compelling notion to me. … When you do life consciously, however, life becomes pretty strange—paying attention changes the thing attended to—so the Happenings were not nearly as lifelike as I had supposed they might be. But I learned something about life and “life”’ (Kaprow, 1993 1979, p. 195). And again, regarding his Activities: ‘Such displacements of ordinary emphasis increase attentiveness but only attentiveness to the peripheral parts of ourselves and our surroundings. Revealed this way they are strange. Participants could feel momentarily separated from themselves’ (Kaprow, 1993 1979, p. 198).

[3] ‘In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all but very interesting’ (Cage, 1939, p. 93).

[4] There is a long history of reveling in the internal sound of the body/mind. In the Yogic tradition this is typified by Nada Yoga (Nada = Sound), which involves plugging one's ears with the fingers and focusing the attention on the Anahata, or ‘Unstruck’, Sounds, of which there are ten. The sounds are unstruck in the sense that they are continuous and have no beginning (Sivananda, 2000, p. 107). Composer and improvisor Richard Teitelbaum makes a very brief but interesting note of Nada Yoga and its relation to the orchestration of Tibetan music, and on its relationship to biofeedback music in an article from the classic book, Biofeedback and the Arts (Teitelbaum, 1976, p. 45).

[5] ‘The finger that points to the moon is not the moon itself ’ is a saying generally attributed to Buddhism or Zen Buddhism.

[6] The ‘monkey-mind’ sensor is simply a hand-held button pushed when the meditating performer realizes that she or he has been thinking. After pushing it, the performer then returns to trying to not think.

[7] Realtime analysis vectors produced include: (breath) shape, rate, duration, duration between breaths, amplitude, and count; (heart) shape, rate (beat-to-beat, per 15 seconds, and per 60 seconds), calculation of harmonics based on the fundamental ‘pitch’, and count; (brainwaves) shape, alpha-, beta-, and delta-wave burst-detection, and pitch-following; (ratios) relationships between all of these in ratio form, for instance (breath rate : breath length); (breath rate : heart rate); and so on. The ‘monkey-mind’ trigger (see Note 6) was not used during this performance, but was during Farewell Rituals, Sitting.Sangha and Sitting.Breathing.No.1; the vectors produced included a trigger, the duration between triggers, trigger count, and density per minute.

[8] I would like to thank Dan Krimm.