The body instrument is the culmination of my research in kinae-sonic reflexivity. Kinae-sonic can be defined as a marrying of two words, originally defined by researchers Julie & Mark Bokowiec in Kinaesonics: The intertwining relationship of body and sound. Kinaesthetic means to be aware of one's body and movement - a word that is often used by researchers and practitioners working with movement and body. Kinaesonic is therefore 'the mapping of sound to bodily movements'. The combination of both kinaesthetic and kinae-sonic practices, results in a system that is reliant on a constant feedback loop to work – the system needs movement to generate sound and the dancer requires sound to respond to in order to repeat the process again and cycle through instantaneously. Reflexivity theory defined by Katherine Hayles in Toward Embodied Virtuality refers exactly to this type of feedback loop – “that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates.”

The idea of having an instrument that is in constant dialogue with the performer made me curious of the potential this can have on the music and how it could work. The answer in this case was to have an instrument that reacts to the movement, but also has a brain of its own to respond differently every time.

This project is still in its infancy and is currently being developed further.

Made using Kinect (& Kinect Studio), TouchDesigner and MaxMSP.