An Embodied approach to acousmatic music

Abstract

Acousmatic music offers a unique laboratory for the consideration of the embodied experience of music. Acousmatic works tend to operate on two simultaneous planes: a more abstract, musical level of gesture, phrase, colour, texture, and motion; and a more literal, narrative level, which references realworld objects, actions, contexts and environments, either more directly – for example through the direct reproduction of such objects and actions – or in a more distanced, mediated manner. These two aspects offer very different perspectives on embodiment, which are enacted simultaneously. On the one hand, the musical aspects of acousmatic music offer an excellent forum for the consideration of more traditionally musical parameters of gesture and phrase as they relate to bodily sensations of movement and motion, in that these parameters, closely linked to the means of sound production in instrumental music, are often divorced from such limiting associations in acousmatic music, and can thus be considered from a broader perspective of embodiment. At the same time, the images and associations embedded in the narrative layer offer the potential for a more direct link to objects, actions and situations recognised from our experience of the world, with all the detail of embodied memory and perception.