Reed, Courtney N; Morrison, Landon; McPherson, Andrew; Fierro, David and Tanaka, Atau. 2024. 'Sonic entanglements with electromyography: Between bodies, signals, and representations'. In: Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’24). IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark 1 - 5 July 2024. [Conference or Workshop Item]

Preview

Text DIS_2024___EMG_Sonic_Entanglement.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (19MB) | Preview

Abstract or Description

This paper investigates sound and music interactions arising from the use of electromyography (EMG) to instrumentalise signals from muscle exertion of the human body. We situate EMG within a fam- ily of embodied interaction modalities, where it occupies a middle ground, considered as a “signal from the inside” compared with external observations of the body (e.g., motion capture), but also seen as more volitional than neurological states recorded by brain electroencephalogram (EEG). To understand the messiness of gestural interaction afforded by EMG, we revisit the phenomenological turn in HCI, reading Paul Dourish’s work on the transparency of “ready-to-hand” technologies against the grain of recent posthumanist theories, which offer a performative interpretation of musical entanglements between bodies, signals, and representations. We take music performance as a use case, reporting on the opportunities and constraints posed by EMG in workshop-based studies of vocal, instrumental, and electronic practices. We observe that across our diverse range of musical subjects, they consistently challenged notions of EMG as a transparent tool that directly registered the state of the body, reporting instead that it took on “present-at-hand” qualities, defamiliarising the performer’s own sense of themselves and reconfiguring their embodied practice.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661572
Additional Information:	AT has received funding from the European Research Council (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant FP7-283771 (‘META GESTURE MUSIC’) and from the Horizon 2020 grant no. 789,825 (‘BIOMUSICAL INSTRUMENT’). AT and DF have been supported by funding from the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-21-CE38-0018), ‘Brain-Body Digital Musical Instrument (BBDMI).
Keywords:	Embodied interaction, research through design, entanglement, posthumanism, phenomenology, electromyography, musical interaction
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Computing
Dates:	Date Event 2024 Accepted 1 July 2024 Published
Event Location:	IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Date range:	1 - 5 July 2024
Item ID:	38320
Date Deposited:	11 Feb 2025 11:11
Last Modified:	11 Feb 2025 11:11
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/38320

View statistics for this item...

Edit Record (login required)