Sonic Entanglements with Electromyography: Between Bodies, Signals, and Representations
C. Reed, L. Morrison, A. P. McPherson, D. Fierro & A. Tanaka. 2024.
Designing Interactive Shystems
This paper investigates sound and music interactions arising from the use of electromyography (EMG) to instrumentalise signals from muscle exertion of the human body. We situate EMG within a family of embodied interaction modalities, where it occupies a middle ground, considered as a “signal from the inside” compared with external observations of the body (e.g., motion capture), but also seen as more volitional than neurological states recorded by brain electroencephalogram (EEG). To understand the messiness of gestural interaction afforded by EMG, we revisit the phenomenological turn in HCI, reading Paul Dourish’s work on the transparency of “ready-to-hand” technologies against the grain of recent posthumanist theories, which offer a performative interpretation of musical entanglements between bodies, signals, and representations. We take music performance as a use case, reporting on the opportunities and constraints posed by EMG in workshop-based studies of vocal, instrumental, and electronic practices. We observe that across our diverse range of musical subjects, they consistently challenged notions of EMG as a transparent tool that directly registered the state of the body, reporting instead that it took on “present-at-hand” qualities, defamiliarising the performer’s own sense of themselves and reconfiguring their embodied practice.
Citation
Reed, C. N., Morrison, L., McPherson, A. P., Fierro, D., & Tanaka, A. (2024). Sonic entanglements with electromyography: between bodies, signals, and representations. Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 2691–2707). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661572, doi:10.1145/3643834.3661572
BibTeX
@inproceedings{10.1145/3643834.3661572, author = {Reed, Courtney N. and Morrison, Landon and McPherson, Andrew P. and Fierro, David and Tanaka, Atau}, title = {Sonic Entanglements with Electromyography: Between Bodies, Signals, and Representations}, year = {2024}, isbn = {9798400705830}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661572}, doi = {10.1145/3643834.3661572}, abstract = {This paper investigates sound and music interactions arising from the use of electromyography (EMG) to instrumentalise signals from muscle exertion of the human body. We situate EMG within a family of embodied interaction modalities, where it occupies a middle ground, considered as a “signal from the inside” compared with external observations of the body (e.g., motion capture), but also seen as more volitional than neurological states recorded by brain electroencephalogram (EEG). To understand the messiness of gestural interaction afforded by EMG, we revisit the phenomenological turn in HCI, reading Paul Dourish’s work on the transparency of “ready-to-hand” technologies against the grain of recent posthumanist theories, which offer a performative interpretation of musical entanglements between bodies, signals, and representations. We take music performance as a use case, reporting on the opportunities and constraints posed by EMG in workshop-based studies of vocal, instrumental, and electronic practices. We observe that across our diverse range of musical subjects, they consistently challenged notions of EMG as a transparent tool that directly registered the state of the body, reporting instead that it took on “present-at-hand” qualities, defamiliarising the performer’s own sense of themselves and reconfiguring their embodied practice.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference}, pages = {2691–2707}, numpages = {17}, keywords = {Embodied interaction, electromyography, entanglement, musical interaction, phenomenology, posthumanism, research through design}, location = {Copenhagen, Denmark}, series = {DIS '24} }