ABSTRACT
The modern performer’s sound is increasingly mediated by electronics, with broad implications for performance practice, composition, and the listener’s experience. Technology facilitates novel venues, instrumentations, and practices, which often elude description via historically employed frameworks. Posthumanism, which discusses how technological development impacts human experience, introduces concepts such as distributed cognition, hybridity, and mutation that are useful for discussing the experiential impact of sound design and processing, while acknowledging the diverse experiences within the field. This chapter applies these terms while investigating performance practice in Michael Gordon’s Industry and Kaija Saariaho’s NoaNoa and provides suggestions for further research documenting the posthuman.
