ABSTRACT
In order to provide a practitioner’s perspective on the creative practices of live-electronic music – as different from instrumental, acousmatic and ‘musique mixte’ – this paper focuses on the performance of a particular composition by the author, Two Pieces of Listening and Surveillance, defined as an ‘autonomous sound-generating system with flute’. The fact that a musical instrument – a flute – is utilised, does not define this composition necessarily as following the ‘instrument plus electronics’ paradigm associated with performances of ‘musique mixte’. The instrument acts here as one of many components of a larger ‘performance ecosystem’: albeit admittedly a very important component. The instrument works as a functional element in a network of relationships and interdependencies among several sound-related resources, including electroacoustic transducers, analogue or computer-operated signal processing methods, and the surrounding physical space. This musical practice requires an exploratory attitude that situates the composer, the performer(s) and the audience in a shared field of active sonic relationships. The close intertwining of ‘instrument’ and ‘listening’ is discussed throughout the chapter in terms of a domain of experience bound up in the action-perception cycle – in other words, as a domain of situated embodied cognition (or ‘enaction’).
