Higher Order Gestalt Fromage

Takuto Fukuda, and Ana Dall'ara-Majek

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

What is it that engenders the sense of “authentic” concert experience? Philippe Auslander asserts that the authentic object for listeners in pop music concerts has changed from performers’ actual musicianship to a simulation of recorded performances that have never existed in the real, but were created with the extensive use of studio production techniques (e.g., lip-syncing on recorded tracks). Drawing on this historical transition of authenticity in concerts from an actual to fictional performance, our composition proposes the ambiguity between corporeal performance and electroacoustic imagery as a new authentic experience in a concert. To this end, the piece focuses on a gradual disintegration of the causal link from a gesture to a sound. The piece starts with a state where a single gesture such as jabbing, tilting and swinging causes a single sonic event such as initiation, transition and termination. As the piece unfolds, the causal link is untied through asynchronization between the gesture and the sound in time, and displacement between the performing bodies and sound positions. Finally, the performing bodies vanish from the stage while the T-Sticks autonomously resonate, remaining only the vestige of human performers. At this point, we authenticate the fictional performance over the actual one as if the unreal is more real than the real – hyperreal.

Citation

Takuto Fukuda, and Ana Dall'ara-Majek. 2021. Higher Order Gestalt Fromage. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.21428/92fbeb44.bae5271d [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2021_music_12,
 abstract = {What is it that engenders the sense of “authentic” concert experience? Philippe Auslander asserts that the authentic object for listeners in pop music concerts has changed from performers’ actual musicianship to a simulation of recorded performances that have never existed in the real, but were created with the extensive use of studio production techniques (e.g., lip-syncing on recorded tracks). Drawing on this historical transition of authenticity in concerts from an actual to fictional performance, our composition proposes the ambiguity between corporeal performance and electroacoustic imagery as a new authentic experience in a concert. To this end, the piece focuses on a gradual disintegration of the causal link from a gesture to a sound. The piece starts with a state where a single gesture such as jabbing, tilting and swinging causes a single sonic event such as initiation, transition and termination. As the piece unfolds, the causal link is untied through asynchronization between the gesture and the sound in time, and displacement between the performing bodies and sound positions. Finally, the performing bodies vanish from the stage while the T-Sticks autonomously resonate, remaining only the vestige of human performers.  At this point, we authenticate the fictional performance over the actual one as if the unreal is more real than the real – hyperreal.},
 address = {Shanghai, China},
 articleno = {12},
 author = {Takuto Fukuda and Ana Dall'ara-Majek},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.21428/92fbeb44.bae5271d},
 editor = {Eric Parren and Wei Chen},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 title = {Higher Order Gestalt Fromage},
 track = {Music},
 url = {https://doi.org/10.21428/92fbeb44.bae5271d},
 year = {2021}
}