ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of Tricky's music across the period from 1994 to 1998, within the framework of ecological perceptual theory and critical theory, and is concerned with aspects of corporeality and autonomy in music. The concept of affordance encapsulates much of the sense of 'function' and 'meaning', but uses both in a manner that is firmly based in action in what an organism can do with an object or event. Music engages the body in a variety of ways, and a variety of psychological frameworks have been suggested to account for listeners' bodily responses to music. 3D's vocal style is much more rhythmically precise than Tricky's, organized tightly around the divisions of the 80 bpm pulse. In a literal sense, autonomy means self-government or self-determination, and as applied to music the term denotes a system that operates according to self-sufficient internal principles a kind of idealized and hermetic musical formalism at its limits.
