Key Concepts

The term “embodiment” has numerous meanings and usages. It names a key concept in Feminism and Cultural Studies and is often understood against the background of Merleau-Pontyan Phenomenology, where embodiment refers to the bodily acquisition of knowledge, skill and awareness, and, in prolongation, a self, through being-in-the-world as a lived and felt body. Arnold Berleant offers a concise characterisation of this acquisition: “In embodiment meanings are experienced rather than cognized”. Behind this is a non-Cartesian understanding of the body-mind relationship as only nominally dualistic, and, instead, as fundamentally rooted in the lived body, and its reciprocal relationship with others and the world. There is a “body in the mind”, as Marc Johnson for instance discusses, that is, cognition is “embodied” to an extent that our grasp of concepts is thought to go back to our bodily grasp of the world. A crucial aspect in viewing experience as embodied - as Alva Noë expounds in brilliant continuation of the “enacted approach” presented by Varela, Thompson and Rosch - is to understand perception as active, i.e. as partly being provided by the lived body, and not only as a result of passive projection (representation) of a world that is “objectively” given to the senses.

Using the term “enactment” to describe the dancers’ experience of the perceptive process acknowledges Alva Noë’s work on the crucial role of action in perception, as he argues in his 2004 monography with the same title, and, in a condensed way, in his article “Art as Enaction”. To Noë, experience is not a passive absorption of sensual information, but “a kind of activity, an activity that acquires content [...] thanks to the perceiver’s application of a kind of sensorimotor knowledge” (177). Rather than representing the perceived internally, we bring embodied knowledge actively into what we perceive. On Noë’s view, there are “two aspects of [perceptual] content [...] How [things] (merely) appear to be plus sensorimotor knowledge gives you things as they are” (164). These two aspects are joined in experience much as in Wollheim’s sense of seeing in: “When you look at a tomato, [...] you experience its three-dimensionality in its visible parts” (167). “The content of experience isn’t really given at all – it is enacted” (“Art as Enaction”).^[1]  While Noë is mainly discussing visual perception (and its touch-likeness), my use of the term in the present context addresses the auditory and proprioceptive domains.

When exploring EGM-scenarios, dancers can have dance-directed intentions and music-directed intentions. Their expressive presence – and experience – may thus encompass two media (dance and music), in an interrelated way; hence the term intermedial expression. The described intermediality is a source of tension. The passive following of what dancers hear might not allow them to meet the apparent movement qualities that they feel as emerging in them. The intentional path of motion might bifurcate, into a path suiting dance expectations, and another one suiting sonic expectations. A similar thing happens when they actively imagine sonic continuations of current movements: against wanting to follow through with movement intentions actively, the sonic development might deviate, contradict, or fall short of the continued motion. Sometimes though, the paths converge, so that dancers experience an aptness, or fit, between both intentionalities, in which the paradoxical relationship between them is held in balance.

When exploring EGM scenarios, performers experience a felt resistance affecting their movement, despite there not being given any physical resistance in the instrument whatsoever. As the experienced tactility of the sonic scenarios is induced not primarily by the sounds own physicality (that is, its physical impact as soundwaves), but appears to emerge largely via an intermodal “completion” of what the generation of similar sounds felt like in former experience, the working term for these and related experiential phenomena is sonic-haptic illusion (or short: haptic illusion). In some EGM scenarios (e.g. Spheres), the haptic illusion is given in three-dimensional tactility of an illusionary object in space (in this case a sphere).

The term “scenario” is meant to capture the experiential potential opened up by the various constellations of spatial mappings and sound materials designed in EGM; they offer not only individual soundscapes, but also represent different relations between bodily and sonic expression within these (one might feel as if in an environment, but also as if wearing a kind of sonic skin). In being spatially playable patches of generative music, EGM sonic scenarios combine instrumental, composed, and installation characteristics.

An important and much discussed concept in the aesthetics of music, concerning the experience of music as music, instead of mere (meaningless) sequences of sound. The meaning in music can be understood (as for example Stephen Davies and Roger Scruton hold) or felt (in visceral terms as argued for instance by Arnie Cox, as well as in emotional terms), or both (as held by Jerrold Levinson, Andy Hamilton and Deniz Peters, amongst others). For an argument on aspects of the felt dimension see [Peters, 2008 -> Gesture-paper and Peters, 2010 -> BEEM-paper].