ABSTRACT
What can it mean to say that musical activity is embodied? What are the implications for music making as understood through this lens? In this chapter, I discuss how enactive and, moreover, enactive-ecological approaches to music cognition have been fundamental in the development of my creative music practice over the last 14 years. The emerging field of enactive music cognition has gained traction in recent years as a radical alternative to certain theories of embodied music cognition, which remain limited in their focus on representational – or skull-bound – accounts of musical activity. Coming out of non-traditional areas of the cognitive sciences, the enactive approach suggests that cognition emerges out of the developmental bodily processes of sense-making and identity-forming. I outline how these ideas have allowed me to develop a performance practice within the fields of live electronic music and sonic art through the use of highly gestural, haptic, and tangible electronic and digital technologies. In each case, what is demonstrated is that the technological interventions have been important not in terms of their ‘innovative’ qualities per se, but rather in their ability to afford collaborative, participatory, and highly social modes of living musical lives.
