Instruments of Articulation: Signal Processing in Live Performance

Building on the first author's hybrid/augmented violin practice and the second author's work with responsive media environments, we build and reflect on collectively-played room-scale instruments that afford the precision and nuance of an individually-played real-time gestural media system. We consider gestural instruments designed for the interplay of action and perception at the sensorimotor level bypassing tokenization of features of activity and sensors. Our gesturally-modulated media instruments are based not on models or a priori schemata but driven by continuous adaptation to contingent activity and state of the event, as well as compositional intent. We think of such performable, expressive systems as instruments of articulation rather than of representation. Our work is motivated by a progression from phenomenological interpretations of individually-played instruments through non-anthropocentric notions of lived experience, to ecosystemic approaches to ensembles of real-time instruments, people and processes concurrently co-articulating an event.