Gerhard Eckel
University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, Austria (bio)
Embodied Generative Music
Abstract
The Embodied Generative Music project combines an extension of means of artistic expression in, specifically, interactive electronic music, with an advancement of the comprehension of musical (and intermedial) experience. The shared idea of both, the artistic and philosophical, strands of the project, is to explore for an experience under a concept (e.g. the concept of “embodiment”). The experience needs to be had and observed (artistic explorations), the conditions for such experience situatively supplied (scenario design), and the concept developed, criticised, and applied (philosophical argument). A dancer having the particular experience in question simultaneously and implicitly wears it, externalises it; thus it can be observed as expression. All this concerns itself with the presence (and absence) of intermodal perceptive phenomena and their interdependence. Knowledge as to this presence is used in the practical aesthetics of an intermedial performance, as well as, in philosophical aesthetics concerning the elucidation of musical experience. This is the basis for (applied) phenomenological research into musical perception, and artistic research for new means of expression, in the forms both undertaken in EGM.