Feeling movement in live electronic music: An embodied autoethnography
Mary Mainsbridge · 2022
Movement-based interaction relies on the measurement and abstraction of human motion. Yet reducing physical experience to quantitative and visual representations overlooks the inner perceptions and sensations that accompany movement. Rather than treating the body as an object to be observed and analysed, soma-based design approaches instead reflect first-person perspectives of felt experience, providing insight into how the body experiences and interacts with the world. Applying these methods to the musical realm, this paper offers a personal account of working with motion-sensing interfaces, exploring the underlying qualities and meanings of performance actions in live and recorded contexts. The embodied authethnographic study serves as an opportunity to question normative approaches to technology that favour techno-scientific narratives of external control and surveillance. Alternative values of agency, autonomy, empathy and transparency are investigated using first-person methodologies.