ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with contextualising the turn to performance in relation to disciplinary trends in the Humanities at large, notably the renewed interest in affect and attendant theories of habit and habituation. It argues that the two historical traditions for grasping processes of habituation are both inadequate to the task of mapping the role of new media in musical perception today. The chapter outlines the limits of a particularly influential essay extolling the virtues of musical performance. It aims to evaluate the interest in performance in relation to a broader contemporary context; namely, the emergence of distinctive new musical practices in an era of ubiquitous biotechnification. The chapter investigates the role of additional agents – namely, technological interfaces, material objects, tools, things and designs – as the productive hinge between human music-making and the resulting sounding forms. Music’s emergent performance practices – or modes of cultural mimesis – are shown to bear a foundational relation to techno-chronemics.
