Performance Ecosystems: Ecological approaches to musical interaction
Simon Waters · Research Portal (Queen's University Belfast) · 2007
Music is understood as a dynamical complex of interacting situated embodied behaviours.These behaviours may be physical or virtual, composed or emergent, or of a time scale such that they figure as constraints or constructs.All interact in the same space by a process of mutual modelling, redescription, and emergent restructuring.(Impett, 2001) As will be self-evident, this is a work in progress.The text is structured around the paper presented at EMS07 in Leicester, but draws freely on a preceding presentation, at the Sonorities Two Thousand +SIX Symposium 1 , to provide context for and elaboration of, some of its main points.The notion of the performance ecosystem is presented as a fruitful tool for the understanding and analysis of current musical activity 2 .It is suggested that this mode of understanding usefully alerts us to connections with historical music practices, while enabling us to address the realm of the virtual.The paper will look at a selection of practical projects and performances which have formed a nexus of activity at the University of East Anglia over the past five years, addressing contiguities between composition and performance, performer and instrument, instrument and environment.The bulk of this activity has been the work of research students and academic staff based at UEA, but a continuous programme of visiting artists, performers and lecturers has significantly influenced that activity, and funding from AHRB 3 and EPSRC 4 has informed the focus of the practice.The instances selected 5 therefore include a variety of hybrid virtual/physical feedback instruments developed specifically under the banner of the latter funding stream, while also presenting glimpses of the work of visiting practitioners such as Nic Collins and Agostino di Scipio which have provided context and inspiration.Like much of what I do this paper is driven by a sense that those whom compose or perform, particularly in highly technologised environments, are wont to celebrate the technological, and to be reductive about (or at least less attentive to) the nature of music as an activity (as EMS : Electroacoustic Music Studies Network -De Montfort/Leicester 2007 1/20