Skill development and stabilisation of expertise for electronic music performance

Abstract

Skill development, the stabilisation of expertise through practise, and processes of bodily as well as neural sharing in the context of gesture-based electronic music performance are the topic of this article. The key questions centre around the affective, embodied but also neurological aspects of these processes. The types of awareness on a corporeal level and the neural processes that occur within the musician and the listener-viewer are investigated, since in music performance the perceptions of musician and audience depend on shared embodiment and cognitive processes. The aim is to show that ‘enactive’, embodied concepts merely provide a different perspective of the same complex matter than what the cognitive neurosciences propose. A concrete musical piece is used as an example that shows a gestural practice using sensor-based instruments and digital sound processing in order to expose the critical relationships between musician, instrument, technology and the audience. The insights arising from blending the two complementary perspectives in this context can be productive both for artistic practice as well as systematic research in music.