Professor Sally-Jane Norman

Musicking and sonic arts serve to sound out our social and physical environments, and to enrich our symbolic constructs and practices. The human shaping of sound waves to express relations to other living beings, to material and immaterial forces, has produced corporeal techniques and artefacts I call performance technologies, using this term to encompass historical and emerging practices. Many contemporary performance technologies feature novel computational and electronic processes that are inevitably haunted by existing sonic cultures, informed by archaeoacoustic investigations of sounding bodies and spaces, and by organology’s explorations of multiple musical histories. In this contemporary context, I’m interested in the tensions between sought innovation and the need to meaningfully extend existing practices.

My paper will focus on the ways these tensions play into interface research like that featured in New Interfaces for Musical Expression conferences launched in 2000, and International Conferences for Live Interfaces launched in 2012. Beyond adoption by such research communities of skeuomorphs and other ostensibly obsolete references to ground “new media” developments, I will reflect on their growing awareness of the deeper cultural anchorages – the ghosts – that productively haunt our performance technologies.