Common Ground: Making Meaning in the Arts and Sciences

 

Body-Driven Computer Music

Miguel Chuaqui, Associate Professor,
School of Music,
University of Utah

Abstract

The traditional role of technology in music production has been to replace interactive body-driven instruments, such as the piano, with non-interactive instruments that play on their own, such as the radio. In my electro-acoustic works, however, the human performer is always the driving force, and this idea is present, as well, in research projects that don’t have an artistic goal as their aim. For example, I have been working with colleagues in the Pain Center on a pilot project, funded by a University Incentive Seed Grant, to develop a therapeutic device that will allow subjects to monitor and modulate their level of relaxation by influencing music through their biological signals.This device is similar in concept to the software instruments that I have created for interactive dance projects, where physical movements, instead of biological signals, influence sound. Rather than diminishing the role that the human body plays in creating music, these projects expand the physical human presence in the musical results that technology yields.

Bio

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