ABSTRACT
Improvised audiovisual performance is a rich field of creative practice, fuelled by the image-centricity of contemporary performance culture and increasingly affordable and powerful technology for live digital image projection. However, the domains of audio and visual creativity frequently remain separate. Contemporary literature on new interfaces for musical expression are frequently centred on aspects of design and expressivity within the framework of music performance alone, and discussions on interactive and graphic scores for contemporary music performance focus on the affordances of the visual score as a medium. Meanwhile there are limited frames of reference for examining improvised audiovisual performance as an integrated practice.
In this chapter, we focus on integrating the concept of gestural surrogacy from the spectro-morphological tradition with concepts of multi-sensory feature binding to build up a materialist approach to audiovisual performance analysis. To support this investigation, we utilise case-studies of three distinct approaches to audiovisual performance practice, using a combination of motiongram and spectrogram analysis along with artistic comment from the authors of each piece.
