Cyber Somatic Ritual

"Resonance Reverie: A Cybernetic Somatic Ritual" is an immersive audio-visual experience which invites the audience to join in for a collective moment to ground, find presence, and reflect. The piece is a 20 to 30 minutes seated performance exploring how different audio and musical techniques can be used to evoke various somatic sensations; techniques such as stereo panning, beating between slightly out-of-tune notes, microsounds, and unquantized loops to create emergent and unpredictable melodies. 

A combination of technologies such as livecoding practices, cello, an expressive gesture-based granular synthesizer, and the acoustics of the space itself are used to produce the different somatic effects. 

The motivation and influence for the piece stems from a lifelong acoustic cello practice, learning to experience the feeling of the sounds as well as the notes. When playing the instrument, the wooden body resonates and sends the vibrations through the player. There is an opportunity to focus less on playing the correct notes, and focus on how the notes feel when played. These are interpretations of the work expressed by Pauline Oliveros in texts such as Deep Listening. When amplifying the music through larger systems, the somatic effects are emphasized – particularly when using subsonic frequencies. 

When creating music into sound healing contexts, attention is brought to the feelings of the sound with constant adjustments being made to attune to the energy of a space. The improvisational nature of livecode lends itself well to respond to the energy in the live context. 

Technically the piece uses an expressive granular synth created in SuperCollider, where key parameters are controlled by mouse movement. The expressivity of the mouse movement is similar to that of the cello, where even the most subtle movements are heard (and felt). The visuals and audio are tightly coupled where this expressivity is also seen in real time. The visuals play with forms rather than subjects while the audio focuses on the feeling of notes rather than the notes themselves. 

Through this piece, the audience can appreciate how livecoding (in harmony with other technologies) can create an expressive and ethereal experience.