An Enactive Approach to Digital Musical Instrument Design

Newton Armstrong

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE BY THE DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC

November 2006

 Copyright by Newton Blaire Armstrong, 2006. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents ............................................................................ iii Abstract ..........................................................................................v Acknowledgements ......................................................................... vii 1 Introduction............................................................................... 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2 The Disconnect .........................................................................2 Flow ........................................................................................6 The Criteria of Embodied Activity ................................................8 The Computer-as-it-comes....................................................... 12

The Interface ............................................................................16 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 Interaction and Indirection....................................................... 16 Representation and Cognitive Steering ...................................... 18 Computationalism ................................................................... 23 Sensing and Acting ................................................................. 32 Functional and Realizational Interfaces ...................................... 41 Conclusion ............................................................................. 49

Enaction ....................................................................................51 3.1 3.2 Two Persistent Dualisms .......................................................... 51 Double Embodiment ................................................................ 55
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3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 4

Structural Coupling ................................................................. 61 Towards an Enactive Model of Interaction .................................. 69 The Discontinuous Unfolding of Skill Acquisition .......................... 82 Conclusion ............................................................................. 98

Implementation ......................................................................100 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Kinds of Resistance ............................................................... 100 Mr. Feely: Hardware.............................................................. 103 Mr. Feely: Software............................................................... 116 Mr. Feely: Usage Examples .................................................... 128 Prospects ............................................................................. 148

Groundlessness .......................................................................152 Bibliography................................................................................. 155

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Abstract

Digital musical instruments bring about problems for performance that are different in kind to those brought about by conventional acoustic instruments. In this essay, I argue that one of the most significant of these problems is the way in which conventional computer interfaces preclude embodied modes of interaction. I examine the theoretical and technological foundations of this disconnect between performer and instrument, and sketch an outline for the design of embodied or enactive digital instruments. My research builds on recent work in human-computer interaction and soft artificial intelligence, and is informed by the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as well as the enactive cognitive science of Francisco Varela and others. I examine the ways in which the conventional metaphors of computer science and hard artificial intelligence derive from a mechanistic model of human reasoning, and I outline how this model has informed the design of interfaces that inevitably lead to disembodied actional modes. I propose an alternative model of interaction that draws on various threads from the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and the enactive cognitive scientists. The enactive model of interaction that I propose is concerned with circular chains of embodied interdependency between performer and instrument, instrumental resistance to human action and intentionality, and an integrative approach to the roles of sensing, acting and cognitive process in the incremental acquisition of performative skill.

The final component of the essay is concerned with issues of implementation. I detail a project in hardware and software that I present as a candidate enactive digital musical instrument, I outline some specific usage examples, and I discuss prospects for future work.

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Acknowledgements

This paper would have been a much bigger mess were it not for the timely contributions of a number of people. In particular, I have benefited from the very careful readings and insightful criticisms of my advisor, Barbara White, and my first reader, Dan Trueman. Paul Lansky has uttered more wise words than I could count, and he has changed my mind about many things during my time at Princeton (although, as far as I can tell, that was never really his intention). Perry Cook has taught me a great deal about interaction, both in his classes and in the approach to design that he takes in his own projects. He has been an outstanding role model in terms of bridging the gap between theory and practice, and knowing when its time to just sit down with a soldering iron. I have also benefited greatly from conversations with other graduate students while at Princeton. In particular, Id like to thank Ted Coffey, Paul Audi, Mary Noble, Seth Cluett, Scott Smallwood and Ge Wang, each of whom has given me feedback on my work, in the form of both critical readings and more casual conversations about the core topics. Im also grateful to the other composers in my intake year: Paul Botelho, Stefan Weisman and Miriama Young. Together we represent a diverse group, but there has been a considerable and on-going interest in each others work, and this interest has been borne out in tangible forms of support for our respective projects and activities. The history of electronic music performance goes largely without mention in my paper. But the research would not have been possible in the first place were

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it not for those practitioners, from David Tudor to Toshimaru Nakamura, who would question the hidden nature of electronic media in order to uncover not just new sounds, but new potentialities of the body. I am indebted to all those electronic performers whose work I have engaged, whether through written accounts and recordings, or through personal contact and performance collaborations. Although my fingers are rusty from typing, Im looking forward to rejoining the ranks of the improvising community in a less part-time capacity.

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Introduction

Electronics for its own sounds sake is a resource that one would be stupid to dismiss, but the implication is irrelevant, even misleading.

It says that music is a pure art of sound, for people with ears, but with little else no eyes, no nerve endings anywhere but the ears, no interrelated functions. And as a matter of fact much electronic music leaves the impression that this IS the attitude in which sounds are composed.

It says that the functional shape of an instrument is not important as a sculptural object, and that the techniques developed on it, because of its particular virtues and its particular defects, are obsolescent. That the physical, sensual vision of the playing of it is no longer required. Harry Partch, Some New and Old Thoughts After and Before The Bewitched

1.1

The Disconnect

A wooden wheel placed on the ground is not, for sight, the same thing as a wheel bearing a load. A body at rest because no force is being exerted upon it is again for sight not the same thing as a body in which opposing forces are in equilibrium. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

The mid-1990s marked a juncture in the short history of computer music. For the first time, the personal computer was becoming fast enough to be used as a realtime synthesizer of sound; a capability that had previously been the reserve of special purpose machines that were for the most part inaccessible to people working outside an institutional framework. In the years since the mid-1990s, there has been a rapid proliferation of new software and input devices designed specifically for musical performance with general purpose computers, and a burgeoning corpus of new theories, performance practices and musical idioms have emerged in tandem to the new technologies. But while the widespread availability of the personal computer to the first world middle class has resulted in the medium finding its way into any number of new and diverse musical contexts, the question as to whether the computer should be properly considered a musical instrument continues, at least in certain quarters, to generate some controversy. More often than not, these controversies revolve around the relationship between the human performer and the performance medium. Or, more specifically, they revolve around an apparent lack of embodied human presence

and involvement in computer music performance practice. The complainants argue that the performer is either absorbed in near-motionless contemplation of the computer screenthe repertoire of performance gestures not substantively different from those that comprise any routine interaction with a personal computeror that there is a high degree of arbitrariness to the performers actions, where the absence of any explicit correlation between motor input and sonic output results in a disassociation of performer from performance medium. In both instances, what is witnessed is a disconnect; between performer and audience, and between performer and instrument. Those who complain about the current state of computer music performance practice reveal something of their assumptions and expectations as regards musical performance: that the involvement of the performers body constitutes a critical dimension of the practice, and that for such an involvement to be tangible to the audience, its necessary that that audience picks up on somatic cues that signal the point of origin, in real time and real space, of the sounds they are hearing. Defenders of the near-motionless school of computer music performance have suggested that complaints such as these arise not because there is something substantive missing from the interaction between performer and performance medium, but because conventional expectations as regards the constitutive elements of musical performance have not yet caught up to an essentially new performance practice (Cascone 2000; Stuart 2003). The argument has it that the computer, considered as a performance medium, brings a unique set of issues and concerns to the problem of musical performance, and that the attributes of the medium necessitate a break with established instrumental conventions, the modes of performance that are attendant to those
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conventions, and the expectations, assumptions and receptive habits of audiences. Its been suggested that those who take issue with the apparent lack of human motor involvement in current computer music performance practice reveal a mindset created by constant immersion in pop media (Cascone 2000: 101-102), and that the emergence of the new performance paradigm signals a shift away from the locus of the body of the performer; the object of performance is instead transferred to the ears of the audient, who needs to relearn active modes of listening, or aural performativity (Stuart 2003). On both sides of the argument over the state of computer music performance practice, there is a suggestion that something is missing. What distinguishes one side from the other is where that missing something is located: with the performer, or with the audient. Its difficult to defend either position, based as they are on speculative assessments of the receptive habits and practices of listeners. But what can be called into question is the implied corollary to the apologists claim that the burden of responsibility lies with the audient; that is, that computer music performance practice, as it stands, is already mature. In this essay, I take the opposite position: that computer music performance practice remains both theoretically and technologically under-developed, and that most of the interesting and significant work in the field remains to be done. In certain respects, then, the present study is a legitimation of the complaints being uttered against the current state of computer music performance practice. But more pressingly, it is borne out of frustration as a computer music performer. Despite investing a number of years in the development of both hardware and software designed specifically for performance, Ive found that the performance medium has in all but a few instances managed to maintain a safe distance,
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corroborating (from the shaky perspective of first person phenomenal experience) the complaint of the disconnect. Ive come to believe that there is something intrinsic to the computer, something embedded in the medium itself, that is the cause of all this; something that necessarily and inevitably brings about a disconnect. If it turns out that is in fact the case, then the medium effectively guarantees that an embodied coupling of human and instrumenta coupling that creates the possibility of engaged and involved experiencenever quite takes place. Unlike the apologists for the currently predominant modes of computer music performance practice, Im going to suggest that the perceived disconnect, or missing dimension, that certain people have been complaining about, is not due to a conditioned desire for spectacle, or an ingrained expectation that an explicitly causal relation is witnessed between performance gesture and sonic result. Rather, it seems to me that there is something more fundamental to the issue: that an engaged and embodied mode of performance leads to a more compelling, dynamic, and significant form of music making; for the performer, the audience, and for the social space that they co-construct through the performance ritual. If the attributes of the computer preclude such a mode of performance, then the medium deserves to be examined, in order to determine what can be done to engender the technical conditions from which an embodied performance practice might arise.

1.2

Flow

The matter of music is sound and body motion. Aristides, De Musica

Performers of conventional acoustic instruments often talk of the sense of flow they experience while playing.1 Its a way of being that consists in the merging of action and awareness, and the loss of any immediate sense of severance between agent (the performer) and environment (the instrument, the acoustic space, the social setting, and other providers of context). Its the kind of absorbing experience that can arise in the directed exchange between an embodied agent and a physical mechanism, and its a coupling that happens as a matter of course with acoustic instruments. Conventional acoustic instruments offer resistance to the body of the performer, and their responses are tightly correlated to the variety of inputs from the performers body that are afforded by the mechanism.2 In a sequence of on-going negotiations between performer and

For a more complete account of "flow," in the sense that I will use the term, see

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Csikszentmihaly 1991). For a concise summation of the applicability of Csikszentmihaly's ideas to instrumental performance see Burzik's "Go with the flow" (Burzik 2003).
2

The notion of "affordance" was introduced by psychologist James Gibson (Gibson

1977, 1979). In the Gibsonian sense, an affordance is an opportunity for action that the environment presents to an embodied agent. As such, the term accounts for the particular 6

instrument, the performer adapts to what is uncovered in the act of playing, continually developing new forms of embodied knowledge and competence. Over a sustained period of time, these negotiations lead to a more fully developed relationship with the instrument, and to a heightened sense of embodiment, or flow. Performance with a conventional acoustic instrument serves as a useful example of an embodied mode of human activity, and of an engaged coupling with a complex physical mechanism. But in the context of the present study, Im not specifically interested in appropriating the conventions of acoustic instrumental practice for computer music, or in modeling acoustic instruments in the digital domain. Along with those writers who would proclaim the advent of a new computer music performance practice, I hold that the computer, considered as a performance medium, presents new and unique problems and prospects. But where those writers focus on the shortcomings of the audience, I focus on the shortcomings of current theory and technologies, and on the body of the performernot because of the bodys historical coupling to conventional instruments, but because I choose to conceive of the body as a site of possibility and resistance, and because it seems that the computer has a way of both limiting the bodys possibilities and diminishing its potential for resistance.

physical and perceptual attributes and abilities of the agent, as well as her intentionality. To borrow an example from Andy Clark: "... to a human a chair affords sitting, but to a woodpecker it may afford something quite different (Clark 1997:172)."

There are attributes, then, to the experience of playing a conventional acoustic instrument that are pertinent to thinking about the design of digital musical instruments that would allow for embodied modes of performance. The optimal performative experiencethis somewhat intangible and elusive notion of flowcould be characterized as a way of being that is so direct, immediate and engaging, that the normative senses of time, space and the self, are put temporarily on hold. It amounts to a presence and participation in the world, in experiential real time and real space, in which meaning and purpose arise not through abstract contemplation, but directly within the course of action. Such action involves complex and continuous exchanges and interactions between senses, the motor system (muscles), the nervous system (including the brain), and the social and physical environment in which the ritualised act of performance is embedded. In short, the experience of flow, of a heightened sense of embodiment, involves an immediately palpable feeling of active presence in a world that is directly lived and experienced. Traditional though it may seem, these are qualities that I believe are central, and will remain central, to musical performance. If the computer is going to figure as a musical instrument, and if it does not presently lend itself to embodied form of interaction, then some work needs to be done.

1.3

The Criteria of Embodied Activity

Over the course of this essay, Ill return to what I take to be the five key criteria of embodied musical performance; or, more specifically, the five key criteria of

the particular kind of embodied mode of interaction with digital musical instruments that I hope to uncover through outlining a philosophically informed approach to instrument design. Those criteria are: 1. Embodied activity is situated. Embodiment arises contextually, through an agents interactions with her environment. The agent must be able to adapt to changes in the environment, and in her relationship to it, without full prior knowledge of the features of the environment, or of its structure and dynamics. 2. Embodied activity is timely. Real world activity involves real-time constraints, and the agent must be able to meet these constraints in a timely manner. This means that it is incumbent on the agent to not disrupt the flow of activity because her capacity for action is too slow.3 3. Embodied activity is multimodal. A large portion of the agents total sensorimotor capabilities are galvanised in performance. This involves

David Sudnow uses a nice example of untimely behavior in Ways of the Hand: Recall Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line in Modern Times: the conveyor belt continuously carrying a moving collection of nuts and bolts to be tightened, their placements at regular intervals on the belt, Chaplin holding these two wrenches, falling behind the time, rushing to catch up, screwing bolts faster to stay ahead of the work, missing one or two along the way, because the upcoming flow seems to gain speed and he gets frantic, or because it actually does speed up, eventually caught up in the machine and ejected onto the factory floor in his hysterical epileptic dance. (Sudnow 2001:32-3)

optimising the use of the bodys total available resources for cognition, action and perception, with an emphasis on the concurrent utilisation of distinct sensorimotor modalities, as well as the potential for mutual interaction, or cross-coupling, between those modalities. 4. Embodied activity is engaging. The sense of embodiment arises when the agent is required by the task domain. That is, the environment is incomplete without the involvement of the agent, and it presents challenges to the agent that consume a large portion of her attention. 5. The sense of embodiment is an emergent phenomenon.4 That is, optimal embodied experience arises incrementally over a history of sensorimotor performances within a given environment or phenomenal domain. There is a link between increasing sensorimotor competence within the task domain and the sense of embodiment. Borrowing from cognitive scientists Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991), I will refer to the embodied mode of performative activity Im outlining here as enactive. Ill address the concept of enaction in more depth in Chapter 3, but for the time being its useful

This criterion could perhaps have been condensed into the phrase "embodiment is an

emergent phenomenon." But this is potentially misleading, as embodiment is a given for biological systems; i.e., living organisms do not emerge into their bodies. The sense of embodiment, then, is phenomenal, whereas the fact of embodiment is objective. The implications of this double sense of embodimentof its "inner" and "outer" aspectsare explored in Chapter 3.

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to emphasize the centrality of the body to the enactive model of cognition. In contrast to orthodox views of mental process that view cognition as the internal mirroring of an objective external world, the enactive perspective takes the repeated sensorimotor interactions between the agent and the environment as the fundamental locus of cognitive development. This encompasses the dynamics of the experiential present, i.e., that which is ineluctably the now, but it also encompasses the emergence and development of knowledge and competence, i.e., the cognitive dimension of activity. In the enactive view, cognition is fundamentally an embodied phenomenon; it arises through and within an agents physical interactions with her environment. To that extent, the now of lived experience, of an instantaneous conceptual and corporeal disposition within a given environment, plays a determining role in the emergence of cognitive systems and structures, and cognitive systems and structures, in turn, play a determining role in constituting the now. Its an ongoing, circular, and fully reciprocal process of mutual determination and specification in which subjectivity and the sense of embodiment are in a continuous state of flux. This model of cognition, with its emphasis on bodily involvement in the bringing forth of a world,5 provides a template for the performance practice that I hope will emerge from this study.

The expression is borrowed from Varela, Rosch and Thompson's The Embodied Mind

(Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991).

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1.4

The Computer-as-it-comes

A number of authors (Agre 1995, 1997; Clancey 1997; Dourish 1999, 2001; Stein 1999; Winograd and Flores 1986) have shown that it is no easy task to design computing devices that would allow for embodied modes of interaction. The prevailing guiding metaphors of computer science (CS) and human computer interaction (HCI)6 are at odds with the embodied/enactive approach, and routinely preclude modes of interaction that are situated, timely, multimodal, and engaging, or that lead to a heightened sense of embodiment over a history of interactions. And while the subset of computing devices that is of specific interest to this essaydigital musical instrumentsis these days comprised of a vast and diverse array of implementations, the field as a whole has not been immune to

The "prevailing guiding metaphors" of CS and HCIi.e., the epistemological

underpinnings of what I have labelled "conventional" CS and HCIwill be outlined in terms of a computationalist ontology in Chapter 2. Lynn Andrea Stein has suggested that it was a matter of historical contingency that saw the computationalist approach hold sway in the formative days of computer science: Cybernetics took seriously the idea of a computation embedded in and coupled to its environment. These were precisely the issues suppressed by the computationalist approaches. In the intellectual battles of mid-century, cybernetics failed to provide the necessary empowerment for the emerging science of computation and so was lost, dominated by the computational metaphor. The nascent field of computational science was set on a steady path, but its connections to the world around it were weakened. (Stein 1999:482)

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the guiding metaphors of conventional CS and HCI. This is not to say that all digital musical instruments have failed to realize the potential for embodied modes of interaction. But rather, those instruments that have managed to realize this potential have done so despite the conventional tenets of CS and HCI. It may be useful to distinguish between two main currents in present day computer music performance practice. The first of these would take the personal computer more or less as it comes (with minimal or zero additions to the standard input devices), and would normally be characterized by the nearmotionless mode of performance described earlier in the chapter. This practice is often encapsulated under the rubric of laptop music,7 and has given rise to a so-called laptop aesthetic (Jaeger 2003). The second of the two currents is defined precisely through its non-acceptance of the computer-as-it-comes as a musical instrument. Rather, the practitioners seek to extend computing devices, or even completely reconfigure them, through the development and integration of new technologies designed specifically for musical performance. This is the field of activity to which my own work belongs, and I will refer to it under the (intentionally) broad term of digital musical instruments. A third current could also be identified, of extended acoustic instruments, in which the computer is used as a signal processing add-on or improvising partner to a conventional

The term "laptop music" surfaced in the second half of the 1990s, at around the

same time that the first "laptop performers" began to appear. For a diverse range of assessments of laptop performance practice and its reception, see the articles collected in Contemporary Music Review 22 (4), 2003.

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acoustic instrument. But as the presence of the acoustic instrument already invokes the potential for embodied performance, this area of practice is not of specific relevance to the present study. The computer-as-it-comes is a term that will appear throughout this essay. What I intend to denote is not so much a specific device (although it could be), but rather a general notion of the more or less generic personal computer; the technological instantiation of the conventional guiding metaphors of CS and HCI. This is the computer that laptop music adopts wholesale into its performance practice, and the same computer that those working towards digital musical instruments would seek to re-engineer in order to arrive at embodied modes of performance. There has been a great deal of activity in recent years in the development of new digital musical instruments. There has also been a steadily growing corpus of scholarly articles, research papers and theses on issues in live computer music. While this has lead to numerous innovations in both the theory and technology of computer music performance, there remains a near total absence of work related specifically to the philosophical foundations of instrument design. I believe that the most pressing issues in arriving at designs that allow for embodied forms of musical interaction with computers are philosophical, and that in order to arrive at sustainable designs for enactive instruments, the limits and potentialities of the current computational mediai.e., the defining attributes of the computeras-it-comesneed to be examined in philosophical terms. The tendency in digital musical instrument design has been to focus on the pragmatic issues of design: specific sensor and actuator technologies, audio

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synthesis methods, mapping strategies, and so on. Without addressing these issues at some point, there will, of course, be no digital musical instruments of which to speak. But in this essay I focus more on the theoretical and foundational issues of design, with a view to providing a conceptual touching stone for the pragmatic stage. While there is a great deal of overlap between the pragmatic and the foundational issues, it seems to me that the shift of emphasis is potentially very useful. Without proper attention to the foundational issues, there is a greater likelihood that designers will unwittingly fall back on the received tenets of CS and HCI, even though those tenets may (and more often than not will) work against the bringing into being of enactive instruments. The personal computer brings with it a sizable repertoire of usage conventions, and, all too regularly, designers end up drawing on the conventional patterns of use without proper consideration of the implications of those patterns for the end user. As I will endeavour to show, these implications are philosophical in origin, reflecting world views, and models of interaction, behavior and cognition, that are immanent in designs, and, in turn, in the technological artifacts that result from those designs. If a medium precludes a desired usage an embodied mode of interaction, for exampleand if it does so because of the world models that are embedded in its very mechanism, then that medium needs to be examined with a philosophical perspective in order to arrive at a better understanding of the ways in which it determines its patterns of use. This is the first step towards rethinking and reconfiguring those patterns, and towards arriving at designs that are more fully and properly geared towards the requirements and desires of embodied human actors.

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The Interface

Musical ideas are prisoners, more than one might believe, of musical devices. Pierre Schaeffer, Traite des Objets Sonore

2.1

Interaction and Indirection

Interaction takes place when signals are passed back and forth between two or more entities. Interactions between a human and a computer are conducted through an interface. The interface provides the human with a means of access to the programs running on the computer; it consists in providing an appropriate abstraction of computational data and tasks to the user. Input devices (such as keyboards and mice) capture signals from the user that are mapped, through the interface abstraction layer, to changes in the state of computer programs. Output devices (such as monitors, loudspeakers and printers) transmit human-decodable respresentations of the state of the running programs from the computer back to the user. Human-computer interface design is therefore concerned with providing the user with a set of usage practices, protocols and procedures appropriate to the task domain for which the interface, in the first instance, is required.

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One thing that distinguishes the computer from tools such as, say, the canonical example of the hammer,1 is the absence of any direct correlation between the physical domain in which a computational task is carried out, and the way in which that task is conceived by the user. The hammer, considered as an interface, is correlated within the users cognitive apparatus to the physical act of hammering. But a computer users interactions with a computer are rarely, if ever, correlated within the cognitive apparatus to the electrical phenomena that constitute the physics of computation. Rather, in order to accomplish meaningful tasks with computers, its physical operations are abstracted, and the task domain is presented to the user in the form of graphical and auditory representations. It follows that interactions with a computer are necessarily indirect. This sets the medium apart not only from the hammer, but from the overwhelming majority of tools that humans use, including conventional acoustic musical instruments. Already, then, in the distance that the interface imposes between the human and the computer, we see the disconnect between agent and medium. The physics of computational media consists in the regulated flow of electrons through circuits, and the human agent does not interact with those circuits in any kind of physically direct manner. Rather, in order for significant interactions to take place, the interactional domain needs to be designed, input devices need to

The hammer example has figured large in philosophy of technology and media theory

since its appearance in Heidegger's Being and Time (Heidegger [1927] 1962) and The Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger [1949] 1977)." For an interesting analysis of the role that the hammer has played within these discourses, see Don Ihde's Instrumental Realism (Ihde 1991).

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be be mapped to tasks and procedures in software, and software data need to be transmitted to the user in the form of representations. The overriding goal of conventional human-computer interface design is to reduce the inevitable distance between agent and medium, ideally to the extent that the user comes to conceive of the task domain directly in the terms of the representations that comprise the interface.2 To a certain extent, reducing the degree of indirection between agent and medium is also the goal of the present study. But an enactive model of interaction will require an entirely different approach to that taken by conventional HCI.

2.2

Representation and Cognitive Steering

Things is what they things. .o. (printed on a coffee mug)

The computer-as-it-comes packages interface abstractions into representational frameworksi.e., aggregated metaphorical schemathat are customarily (though somewhat inaccurately) characterized as software. Users of

This is the express goal of so-called "direct manipulation" interface models (see 2.5

below). More radical approaches, such as tangible and ubiquitous computing, would seek to embed computing devices directly (and invisibly) within the user's environment (Dourish 2001; Greenfield 2006; Norman 1999; Ullmer and Ishii 2001; Weiser 1988, 1991, 1994; Weiser and Brown 1996).

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personal computers are familiar with the now standard interface metaphors for the routine management and maintenance of their computer systems: files, folders, desktops, workspaces, trash cans, and the like. Its a suite of bureaucratic abstractions, extrapolated from a real-world task environment that is likely familiar to the user, that serves to facilitate bureaucratic work, keeping the play of regulated voltagesthe physical agency through which that work is actually accomplishedwell out of the users immediate zone of awareness. The interface amounts to a model of the world; an encompassing system of metaphors that serves to both guide and regulate the agents thoughts and activities through intrinsic correspondences to everyday objects and activities. Its an unusual transaction that takes place between the designers of computer interfaces and the end users of those interfaces. Through the set of interactions made available by whichever incidental pre-packaged representational world, the user participates in whichever incidental model of the world happens to be implicit to the design. Models of the world are born out of philosophical systems. However well-formulated or defined those philosophical systems may be, and however conscious a designer may be of the philosophical underpinnings of the decisions made during the course of design, the transition from design to artifact nonetheless remains loaded with epistemological implications for the end user. This is an unavoidable side-effect of indirection, and, despite a great deal of attention within the fields of interaction design and

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technology studies,3 its a side-effect that remains beyond the bounds of consideration for a large number of designers, and an even larger number of end users. As Philip Agre has put it, technology at present is covert philosophy (Agre 1997: 240). As the interface delineates the conceptual milieu to the user, it orients the users cognitive activity. Through repeated performances, a set of implicit assumptions as regards the elements and structure of the task domain begins to solidify, and through a chain of subtle reciprocal influences, the repertoire of meaningful performance actions becomes more or less fixed in bodily habit. This is what Merleau-Ponty defines as an incorporating practice; a process in which actions are literally incorporatedi.e., registered in corporeal memorythrough repeated performances (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2004). These bodily habits do not so much comprise a catalogue of discrete and distinct states as they do a collection of dispositions and inclinations; arrangements within which the agent is potentially free to move, but which at the same time determine the structure and dynamics of those movements. In a similar vein to Pierre Bourdieus notion of the habitus, there comes to exist a durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations (Bourdieu 1977: 78). To the same extent that an interface encapsulates a model of the world, then, it encapsulates a model of

In particular, see Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger

[1949] 1977), Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (Feenberg 1991), and Agre, Computation and Human Experience (Agre 1997).

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performance. These dual aspects are inextricably intertwined, and over the history of an agents interactions, they are mutually reinforcing. Merleau-Pontys concept of incorporation is consistent with the enactive model of cognition. In the enactive view, the systems and structures that play a determining role in the formation of cognitive patterns are in turn determined by the emergent patterns of interactional dynamics. Or to put it another way, at the same time that repetitive dispositions towards action and modes of perceiving are engendered within the agents sensorimotor mechanisms, cognitive structures emerge from the recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991: 172-173). This formulation is essentially a latter day reworking of the fully recursive process, encompassing incorporating practices, that Merleau-Ponty defined as the intentional arc4 (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2004). In this feedback loop at the heart of the enactive view, there is a high degree of reciprocal determination and specification between perception, action, cognition, and the contingencies of the environment in which perception, action and cognitive process are embedded. If we accept that these dependencies are real, then it will make little sense, when examining an interactional domain with a view to the emergence of cognitive and performative patterns, to draw a hard

In Varela, Thompson and Rosch's The Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch

1991)the book in which "enactive cognitive science" is first outlinedthe authors acknowledge their debt to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. See in particular the book's introduction and opening chapter.

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dividing line between action and cognition, or between the mind and the body. It will also make little sense to examine computer interfaces, and the metaphorical schema that those interfaces encapsulate, without due regard to their contingencies and particularities, and the potential implications for the thoughts and actions of the people who will interact with them. These are important concerns not only when arriving at new designs, but also when looking at the consequences of existing designs for performance. It would seem that the more closely we examine the interface in use, the more quickly the common notion of the interface as a passive and impartial means to an end begins to break down. We come to see that it is far from transparent to the task domain to which it is applied, and we begin to understand it not as an add-on which allows a human to come into relations with an underlying structure, but rather as constitutive of that very structure (Hamman 1997: 40). At the same time that the boundaries of the users potential repertoire of actions and perceptions are determined by the epistemological underpinnings of the representations that comprise the interface, the interface reveals itself as embodying a theory of knowledge and performance. But its how this theory of knowledge and performance is embodied in the interface that is of specific interest to this study. The personal computer arrives from the vendor prepackaged with a vast collection of programmed responses, the user adds to these with the installation of new software, and accomplishes tasks through the agency of the now standard input and display devicesthe keyboard, the mouse, the monitor, and the loudspeakers. The affordances of the computer-as-it-comes determine the limits of what is possible within any incidental task domain, and the user comes to learn, from one piece of software
22

to the next, the kinds of behaviors and outcomes that might be expected to come about as a result of her regulated interactions with the medium. It may well be that for the majority of tasks for which personal computers are routinely used, the computer-as-it-comes is a perfectly adequate medium. But I will endeavor to show that it is precisely the models of activity that are embedded in the interface to the computer-as-it-comes that preclude the sense of optimal embodied experiencethe sense of flowthat can arise in complex real-time activities such as musical performance with conventional acoustic instruments. The predominant guiding metaphors of human-computer interface design, through the agency of software abstractions, and input and display devices, are geared towards routine forms of activity. For complex, situated, embodied and real-time forms of activity, we are in need of new metaphors, new ways of thinking about design, and new technologies. Before heading straight to the drawing board, however, its worth considering what it is, exactly, about the computer-as-it-comes that sways the user into a routine-oriented mode of activity, and thereby precludes the potential for embodied and enactive modes of interaction.

2.3

Computationalism

While little has been written about the philosophical basis of interaction design with specific regard to digital musical instrumentsor even, for that matter, with regard to personal computers in generalits nonetheless a topic that has received some considerable attention, particularly over the last fifteen years, in

23

artificial intelligence (AI).5 Having accomplished so little of what the pioneers of the field promised in the 1960s, AI theorists and practitioners have been forced to critically re-examine the institutionally endorsed models of perception, action and reasoning that originally appeared to have such vast potential. This has led to some important questions being raised as regards the traditional foundations of interaction design, as well as the various philosophical assumptions on which those foundations are built. As a succession of AI implementations would bear out, symbolic representations of real-world task domains must take into account a huge number of environmental variables if the artificial agent-at-large is to be endowed with even a sub-insect capacity for sensing and locomotion. As the complexity of the agents environment increases, the number of environmental variables also increases. In turn, the number of conditions that must be encoded in the agents representation of the environment increases in geometric proportion. Given an environment of incrementally increasing complexity, it does not take long before the computational load on the artificial agent ensures against its being capable of the rapid real-time responses that we witness in the various creatures that inhabit the real world. Moreover, the agent has no capacity for responding to features or obstacles that appear in the environment

In particular see Haugeland (1985), Winograd and Flores (1986), Brooks (1991),

Dreyfus (1992), and Agre (1997).

24

unexpectedly, as each new object requires that a new representation be added, by an engineer, to the agents model of the world.6 It was precisely these kinds of problems that prompted a small faction of AI researchers to question the very principle of symbolic representation.7 This would be no simple task, as since the advent of the Church-Turing thesis (Church 1932, 1936; Turing 1936) computation has largely been conceived as the algorithmically codifiable manipulation of symbols, where those symbols stand in for objects and operations in the world. But even this notion of computationthe originary notion of computer scienceis itself already grounded in an older notion, namely, the mechanistic explanation of the 17th century. The breakaway AI researchers would be arguing, then, not only with the accepted wisdom of the field, but with Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Locke and Newton. They would be arguing against the guiding rubric of computer science, conventional AI, and socalled hard cognitive science, that has variously been labeled mentalism (Agre 1995, 1997), the computational metaphor (Stein 1999), and computationalism (Dietrich 1990; Scheutz 2002). Computationalism is the term that I will use.

For an interesting overview of the various problems posed by the symbolic

representation approach in AI, see the introduction to Andy Clark's Being There (Clark 1997).
7

The first viable alternative to the symbolic representation approach is outlined in

Rodney Brooks' "Intelligence without representation" and "New Approaches to Robotics (Brooks 1991, 1991)."

25

At the heart of the computationalist perspective is the presumption that we reason about the world through mechanized procedure; i.e., through the deductive manipulation of symbols that stand in for objects and operations in the world. Mental activity, therefore, consists in extrapolating data from the world, coding abstractions from that data, and reasoning about the representational domain that those abstractions comprise. This is, by and large, the way in which we program computers to simulate real-world problems and dynamics, and the successes of computer science can make it rather easy to anthropomorphize the process of computation; to see in the mechanical procedure a simulacrum of human thought. Its such a view that provided the original impetus of AI research, and has led to what Agre has termed a dynamic of mutual reinforcement between the technology of computation and the Cartesian view of human nature, with computational processes inside computers corresponding to thought processes inside minds (Agre 1997: 2). Essentially, the computationalist rubric would have it that computation is synonymous with cognition. Its beyond the scope of the present study to enter into what remains a major debate in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science over the mechanistic foundations of thought. I will however argue that the tacit acceptance of the computationalist approach will prove to be a stumbling block in the design of computer interfaces for musical performance, in much the same way that it has already proven to be a stumbling block in the design of artificial agents. If, as Andy Clark has noted, and as the failings of AI would bear out, symbol manipulation is a disembodied activity (Clark 1997: 4), then the computer-as-itcomesa materialization of the computationalist paradigmalready precludes
26

the possibility of embodied forms of interaction. With the current state of knowledge about the workings of the nervous system, there is no precise way of determining whether this is a matter of a symbolic overload, or a representational bottleneck (Brooks 1991), for the human agent. But what can be seen in the computationalist model of representation is a fundamental objectivism in which the reasoning of the agent, whether human or artificial, is situated above and outside the environmental embedding of the agents body. In other words, the agent performs manipulations on symbolic representations of the task domain in a realm of mental abstraction that is always and necessarily disconnected from the environmental niche in which activity actually takes place. The agent is, therefore, a kind of transcendental controller, coding abstractions and reasoning about a world that forever remains exterior to cognitive process. There is, then, an essential dualism at the heart of the computationalist model of cognition. But its a specific variety of dualism; one that sets an inside against an outside. It corresponds to a manner of thinking about the world that George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have identified as the container metaphor:
We are physical beings, bounded and set off from the rest of the world by the surface of our skins, and we experience the rest of the world as outside us. Each of us is a container, with a bounding surface and an in-out orientation. (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 29)

From this ontological grounding, the container metaphor extends to various ways in which we conceptualize time and space, the elements of visual, aural and tactile perception, and events, actions, activities and states. In the discourse of computationalism, such conceptualizations come about as a result of an abstract inner space, the mind, setting itself in contradistinction to both the bodywhich
27

is viewed as little more than a transducer of sensory experienceand the outside world. The container metaphor is consistent with the mechanistic explanation. The bounding surface of the mind is traversed by sensory stimuli, these stimuli are converted into representations of the world-as-perceived, these representations along with the representations of structure that establish their logical connections; a kind of propositional calculusare stored as the contents of the mind, and these contents form the basis from which plans are constructed, by searching through a space of potential future sequences of events, using ones world models to simulate the consequences of possible actions (Agre 2002: 132). When those plans result in behavior, the agent reaches the end of the sequence of events that characterizes the in-out orientation of the mind, and the relationship between agent and world has, in some way or other, been altered. The pertinence of the container metaphor to the present study lies in the strong separation it enforces between agent and environment, as well as between mind and body, and also in the sequential model of activity that it presumes. Implicit to the container metaphor is the assumption that cognition is fundamentally distinct from perceiving and acting, and that mind and matterin the tradition of the Cartesian res cognitans and res extensaare necessarily separate. Its precisely because of the schism between thinking and acting that activity is sequentialthe agent must form an internal represention of the domain and construct a plan before deciding on appropriate action. There is an inevitable delay, then, between decision and action. And over the iterative chain that would characterize extended activitya chain of actions following decisions
28

following actionsa sequence of such delays punctuates the flow of activity. This is a point that I will explore more fully in the next section. The transition from textual to graphical modes of interaction with computers brought with it significant implications not only in terms of how humans and computers interact, but in terms of the accessibility of computing machinery to non-specialists. In order to make computers more accessible, the interaction paradigm would need to be both immediately intuitive to the broadest possible range of human subjects, and applicable across the widest range of known and as-yet-unknown task environments. The great success of the WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing device) model is due, as least in part, to the way in which it galvanizes the users knowledge of the world; this so-called direct manipulation style of interaction draws explicitly on the users capacity to identify symbolic representations of data (files) and processes (programs), andthrough actions such as dragging, dropping, clicking, double-clicking, etc.to accomplish the tasks required by the activity domain. The graphical interface paradigm is nowadays so pervasive, and so obviously effective, that few people would think to question the kind of user knowledge on which it draws. But on examination, it reveals itself to be an instance of the container metaphor; the workspace is a container for folders, which are in turn containers for files, the user puts things in the trash, opens a file or program, and so on. The representational domain is functionally isomorphic with the Cartesian model of mind, and, by virtue of the interface, the user comes to encounter the virtual environment in much the same way as the Cartesian subject encounters the world; through an in-out orientation to an environment populated by well-defined objects.
29

If we consider these encounters with the virtual environment in light of the constitutive role that the interface plays in determining user activity, we can discern that the interface, over a history of interactions, will bring about the disconnect between agent and environment that is implicit to the container metaphor. The model of the world as embodied in the interface will effectively lead to its own realization. I take no position on the suitability of objectivist forms of representation to everyday or mundane computational tasks. When those representations stand in for the states of a task domain, they bring the user to conceive of the task domain, and to act within it, in such a way that the focus is directed at changing or manipulating those states. The objects of the virtual environment provide the locus for interaction, and the user retains the status of detached controller. All is (most likely) well for the maintenance of a spreadsheet, or for uploading files to a server; activities in which it would make sense to have an objective cognizance of the contents of the task domain. But these are not ordinarily the types of activities in which the agents optimal bodily experience, or the sense of flow, have significant bearing on the effective accomplishment of the task at hand. If, however, we are considering the suitability of the computer-as-it-comes as a musical instrument that would allow for embodied modes of interaction, the kind of representations that serve as the access points to the medium, and the world models that those representations embody, constitute an important matter for consideration. By definition, an enactive model of performance would situate the agents cognitive acitivities entirely within her environment. An objectivist model of representational content, which would situate the agents cognitive activities outside her environment, therefore throws up a not inconsiderable
30

obstacle to arriving at embodied modes of interaction. But there can be no practicable form of interaction with a computer without an interface, and an interface requires that the computational activity be represented in some form or other; even if the form of representation is the physical embodiment of the computing device itself.8 The crucial point, then, is the form of representation. More specifically, it is the difference between those forms of representations that set out to passively encode the state of the task domain, and those that would seek to structure the agents active involvement within the task domain. This is a point to which I will return throughout the essay. First, however, its worth examining in closer detail the costs to performance of unwittingly adopting the objectivist/computationalist model of representation that is ingrained in the methods of conventional CS and HCI.

This is precisely the representational strategy behind tangible computing. In terms of

the magnitude of representational abstraction, tangible interfaces are of a very low order. If, for example, the user of a tangible device manages to put the idea that she is interacting with a computer out of mind, her cognizance of the interface is of the same order of abstraction as the Gibsonian affordance ("this chair affords sitting"). For numerous examples of tangible user interface devices see the website of the Tangible Media Group at MIT (http://tangible.media.mit.edu; accessed July 25, 2006).

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2.4

Sensing and Acting

A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its world, and to move ones body is to aim at things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their call, which is made upon it independently of any representation. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

Although the disconnect between agent and environment is intrinsic to the container metaphor as applied to the computationalist model of mind, the container metaphor does not in itself account for how we experience or perceive a disconnect in, for example, musical performance with a laptop computer. And despite the ways in which the WIMP interface regulates the activities of the user, and indeed situates her in a specific and highly determined relation to the medium, its nonetheless entirely possible for that user to become seemingly immersed in the task environment, for the experience to be that of direct manipulation of the interface contents, and for the medium to effectively disappear9 from use.

Disappearance is an important concept in Heidegger's philosophy of technology,

particulary in Being and Time (Heidegger [1927] 1962). In short, disappearance is an indicator of the moment at which the tool user ceases to experience the tool as separate from her body. A state of immersion in the task for which the tool is required leads to the 32

Immersion in the task environment does not, however, provide a guarantee of an embodied mode of interaction. Its likely that an immersive activity is engaging; and as such, it fulfills one of the five key criteria of embodied activity that I outlined in Chapter 1. It would even seem to follow that an immersive activity is, by definition, a situated activity. On closer inspection, however, this would not seem to be the case in the specific example of interaction with the computer-as-it-comes. The context of embodiment, i.e., the environment within which the agents sense of embodiment arises, is the real world. Immersion in a virtual environmente.g., the environment constituted by iconic abstractions of computational data and tasks, as in the WIMP modelinvolves situating the agents attention and intentions squarely within that virtual world. As a consequence, the disconnect with the real world is proportional to the amount of attention consumed by the objects that populate the virtual world. The agent is immersed in the activity, but its that very immersion that determines that the activity is not embodied. Immersive activity involving the computer-as-it-comes is therefore substantively different to immersive activity involving, say, a conventional acoustic musical instrument. In itself, this is still a superficial treatment of a very subtle process, and it would seem that theres more to the issue than drawing a tidy distinction between the virtual and the real, or between abstract and direct modes of

user, in the midst of activity, experiencing the tool as an extension of her body. To that extent, the tool disappears as an object of consciousness.

33

interaction. This is where the issues of timeliness and multimodalityanother two of the five key criteria of embodied activityenter the picture. Ive already discussed the ways in which the core elements of the WIMP model of interactionthe window, icon, menu and pointing deviceplay a determining role in the formation of objectivist concepts in the computer users cognizance of activity. But its not simply a matter that because the interactional domain is an instance of the container metaphor, the user will come to think and act in terms of the objects that populate a world exterior to cognitive process; theres also the how of the container metaphors instantiation within the WIMP model. The key consideration here is the modes for the transmission of signals from computer to user, and from user back to computer; or, more specifically, it is the sensory and motor mechanisms that are called into use, and the sensorimotor habits and patterns that are engendered by those modes of transmission. There are two key facets to the WIMP model that guarantee that interactions with the computer-as-it-comes can never be multimodal: 1. at any given moment, there is only a single and discrete centre of interaction; i.e., the mouse or text cursor, and 2. the weight of emphasis on visual forms of representation consumes a large portion of the users attention, and in doing so diminishes the potential for involvement of the other sensory and motor modalities. These are the two aspects of a mode of interactionthe typical mode of interaction with the computer-as-it-comesthat are experienced by the user as an on-going sequence of pointing, clicking, typing and observing. As the gaze is directed towards an icon of interest to the task, the hand works in tandem with the eyes to move the mouse cursor towards that icon. When the cursor and icon converge
34

on the screen, the fingers click on the mouse button, or press keys on the keyboard, to elicit a response from the on-screen abstraction. The immediate cost of the visuocentric approach to the non-visual sensorimotor modalities is self-evident: the more cognitive resources are allocated to vision, the fewer remain for the agents other sensors and actuators. But there is another aspect that is perhaps less obvious, and this is where the mode of interaction coincides with the issue of timeliness. The single point of interaction that is characteristic of the WIMP model of interaction leads to a mode of activity that is characterized by a sequential chain of discrete user gestures; the flow of time is effectively segmented into discrete chunks, where any action can be taken only after the prior action has been completed. There is no concurrency of actions, no possibility of operating at two or more interactional nodes simultaneously, and no potential for the cross-coupling of distinct input channels.10 With acoustic instrumental performance, its not just the concurrent use of multiple sensorimotor modalities that leads to the sense of embodiment, its the various ways in which these modalities work together and exert influence upon one another, and the way in which the performer, as a function of the ongoing accrual of competence at coordinating the sensorimotor assemblage, is better adapted to meet the real-time constraints of performance.

10

For a comparative analysis of "time-multiplexed" (single point) vs. "space-

multiplexed" (multiple, distributed points) interaction scenarios, see Fitzmaurice and Buxton's "An empirical evaluation of graspable user interfaces (Fitzmaurice and Buxton 1997)."

35

With regard to this notion of timeliness, it may be useful to draw a distinction between planning and agency. The WIMP model of interaction presumes that the user has plans in mind, and that these plans are to be executed, step-by-step, until the objective of the task-at-hand is met. The system of abstractions and representations that typify the WIMP model are not geared to the demands of real time. Rather, building on a model of behavior in which reasoning about representations formed from sense impressions must always take place prior to action, each step towards accomplishing the plan will simply take as long as it takes to sense, infer, and act. Agency, on the other hand, is indicative of behavior that is adaptive to environmental demands and constraints, where those constraints encompass the necessity of a timely response. Agency, in this specific sense, might more properly be defined as embodied agency. But whatever the designation, it points to a mode of performance that is bluntly precluded by the representational infrastructure of the WIMP paradigm. That infrastructure presumes a model of reality in which the contents of the world come prior to our behavioral engagement with the world; a sequence that the enactive approach would seek to reverse. It may be interesting to consider if there may be potential misuses of the computer-as-it-comes that could lead to embodied interactional modes. By misuse, I mean a kind of usage that in one way or another does not correspond to the usage scenarios presumed by the WIMP paradigm. As laptop music has already figured in the discussion, lets assume that the computer-as-it-comes is, in this case, an off-the-shelf laptop computer.

36

The standard input devices of the generic laptop computer are the keyboard and trackpad.11 According to conventional WIMP practice, inputs at these devices are coordinated by the position of the cursor on the computer screen. As I type these words (at my generic laptop computer), the text cursor blinks at the current text position, indicating the point at which the next character in this sequence of discrete characters is anticipated. When Im done typing, Ill move my second finger to the trackpad. Upon contact, a mouse cursor will appear on screen. My finger will guide the mouse cursor to a point at the top-left region of the screen, where prior experience tells me I will find the word File. When the cursor is over that word, Ill use my pointer finger to click the trackpad button. A menu will appear, and as I use my third finger to move the cursor over its contents, each item will be highlighted in turn. My third finger will stop when the menu item Save is highlighted, and again Ill use my pointer finger to click the trackpad button. The structure of the interface determines that my motions will follow a type-point-click sequence, and that at each step in that sequence my attention will be directed towards the single point of interaction that the interface affords. As Ive argued, this kind of determination on the part of the interface will preclude embodied modes of interaction. But with different mappings from the

11

These devices vary from one model of laptop computer to the next; e.g., many

laptops substitute a trackpoint for a trackpad, and the number and type of trackpad buttons may also vary. For the purposes of this example, I will assume a trackpad with a single trackpad button.

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input devices to programse.g., mappings that would subvert the inherent sequentiality of WIMPthe interface acquires new affordances. That is, it solicits new modes of activity from the user. Suppose that some piece of sound synthesis software is written, and that its written expressly to be used without graphical or textual feedback from the computer screen. The cursor, then, is done away with altogether. To minimize unnecessary distractions in performance, the computer screen could be entirely dimmed. Interestingly enough, its in doing away with the cursor that entirely new interactional possibilities for the keyboard and trackpad become apparent. We see that the keyboard does in fact afford multiple points of interaction, and that these points might be engaged concurrently; an affordance that the blinking text cursoralong with the accumulated usage history of QWERTY technologies had somehow hidden from view. We also see that the trackpad affords continuous input with two degrees of freedom; an affordance that was not apparent when trackpad usage was bound up with the task of directing the cursor to discrete points on the computer screen. Could this amount to an interface that affords embodied modes of interaction? The short answer is, I think, perhaps. These misuses of the keyboard and trackpad would seem to circumvent the impediments to embodied activity that characterize the WIMP paradigm: singularity and sequentiality. Mappings from keyboard events to software could be arbitrarily complex, or as simple as the mapping from piano keyboard to hammer and string (one sound event per key event). Either way, the interface affords chording; the formation of composite events from distributed points of interaction. Mappings from trackpad input to software could afford the continuous modification of the sound events thus
38

triggered by the keyboard; and its in the continuity of these modifications that the inherent sequentiality of pointing and clicking would be circumvented. The asymmetry of handedness would likely determine that, because of the fine granularity of action required of keyboard input, chording actions would be performed by the dominant hand, while continuous modificatory actions at the trackpad would be performed by the nondominant hand.12 To situate the hands in optimal position, we might turn the base of the laptop at a 30-45 angle to the standard typing position. We would almost certainly push the (blank) screen to as flat a position as possible, to put it out of the way of the hands. We may, then, have the beginnings of an expressive instrument; even, perhaps, of an embodied performance practice. Whats interesting about this example is that we have not changed the physical structure of the interface; i.e., we continue to use the same keyboard and trackpad that serve as the input devices in the WIMP model. What we have changed, however, is the potential for interaction that the interface affords; and the example shows that these affordances are immanent to the map from input devices to programs. At the same time, then, that we substitute a new map for the WIMP map, we construct a new model of performance. Of course, to any regular user of a laptop computer, these new affordances would need to be learned. And they would need to be learned in spite of the activities the laptop has previously afforded in everyday use. This is not an insurmountable task, especially given that users of general purpose computers

12

The role of bimanual asymmetry in interface design is discussed in 4.4.

39

are, to a certain, limited degree, accustomed to learning new patterns of interaction with each new piece of software. But when I suggested that this reconfigured laptop would perhaps afford embodied modes of interaction, I did so out of a hesitation as regards the physical structure of the interface. That is, while the affordances of the interface have been fundamentally altered by new mappings from hardware to software, and while its entirely feasible that the performer could develop a timely and multimodal mode of interaction with this new interface, there nonetheless remains some physical property of the interface that would seem to be opposed to the development of an embodied performance practice. This may be an issue of the limited potential for resistance in the keyboards pushbutton mechanism, of the arrangement of keys not being conducive to chording, of the limited surface area of the trackpad, of the trackpads proximity to the keyboard, and so on. Or, it may simply be an issue of the instruments failure to be properly indicative of use (a topic I will discuss in Chapter 4). Whatever the explanation, there seems a reasonable possibility that the instrument will not be engaging over a sustained period of practice. And this possibility provides enough incentive to turn attention towards the design of special purpose devices, and to leave unanswered the question as to whether this general purpose device might, under certain circumstance, afford embodied modes of interaction. Ive been concerned in this section with outlining the ways in which the standard interaction model of the computer-as-it-comes precludes embodied activity. One of the hazards of design is the weight of convention on current practice; a force that often goes entirely unnoticed in design practice. It seems to me that its this very forceand the widespread failure to notice itthat has led
40

to numerous music softwares that buy unwittingly into the model of interaction that is implicit to the WIMP paradigm. In doing so, these softwares also buy unwittingly into a model of performance that places abstract reasoning prior to action; a model that inevitably leads to a disembodied mode of interaction. An enactive, embodied agent-based model of interaction, then, will need to arrive at an alternative interactional paradigm to that of the computer-as-it-comes. One of the main objectives of this study is to outline a sketch of one such alternative.

2.5

Functional and Realizational Interfaces

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object, not of recognition, but of a fundamental encounter. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Andrew Feenberg draws a distinction between a primary and a secondary instrumentalization, which respectively consist in the functional constitution of technical objects and subjects, and the realization of the constituted objects and subjects in actual technical networks and devices (Feenberg 1999: 202).13 In terms of the implementation of interfaces, the core difference between the primary and the secondary instrumentalization lies in the way that the task

13

In Feenberg's scheme, primary and secondary instrumentalization respectively

correspond to "essentialist" and "constructivist" orientations of human to medium (Feenberg 1999, 2000).

41

domain is structured. The functional interface (primary instrumentalization) serves a predetermined function; it is structured around a finite set of interactions which are known in advance of the tasks execution. The welldesigned functional interface conceals the specific mechanics of the task, and presents the user with possibilities for action that draw on familiar and often rehearsed patterns of experience and use. The realizational interface (secondary instrumentalization), on the other hand, brings with it the possibility of continuously realizing new encounters and uses, and, in the process, of redetermining the relationship between technical objects and their human subjects. The realizational domain encompasses the contexts of meaning and signification in which human and medium are embedded, and is conducive to dynamic and indeterminate forms of interaction. In short, realization is a form of play. While Feenberg correlates the secondary instrumentalization with a broadly socialist utopian project, he is nonetheless careful to point out that the primary instrumentalization, or functionalism, still has it uses. There are a great many task environments in which it makes sense to facilitate, as transparently as possible, the accomplishment of the task. Landing an airplane, for example, presents a situation in which human agency is best served by an immutable function-relation between the elements of the interface and the range of possible outcomes that the interface represents; the representational correspondence of the interface to the worldi.e. the correlation between the system of interface metaphors and the system of real-world objects and operations for which those metaphors standshould, in the interest of maximizing the potential for continued existence, be static.

42

Efficiency is key to the functionalist approach. In terms of meeting the various constraints and demands of the task environment, its of no use to have the user waste time on the parsing of a complex metaphorical system, and its of no use to involve her in forms of play. Functionalism aims to minimize the cognitive load. To that end, the well-designed functionalist interface is comprised of representations that are immediately familiar to the user. The cognitive effort is at its optimal minimum when the representations have a directly recognizable corollary in the users prior experience of the world. Indeed, the ideal functionalist interface would have the user convinced that it consists of no representations at all; it takes on an artificial transparency through its very leveraging of the users experience. That is, as the task environment obtains its coherence through the system of representations that comprise the interface, the user comes to conceptualize the task directly in terms of what is represented; the representations cease to be denotative, and instead become the intrinsic elements of the task itself. At that moment the task is conflated with the metaphorical domain in which it is represented, and the interface effectively disappears in use; it becomes equipment.14 This situates the user in an interesting position. She is immersed in what would appear to be the im-mediacy of the task, but the medium is still very much present, and continues to be constitutive of the structural relation of technical object and human subject. And while the interface is evidently not at all

14

In Heidegger's terminology, the tool becomes "equipment" at the moment of its

disappearance in use.

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transparent to the task domain, the more it seems to be transparent, the more effectively it corresponds to the ideal of functionalist efficiency. In leveraging the users experience of the world, the interface directs her towards a set of predetermined expectations as regards performance. It minimizes the cognitive demand and, at the same time, defines an interactional context in which significanceat least ideallyis invariable. In contradistinction to the domain of realization, then, the functionalist domain does not encompass the contexts of meaning and signification in which human and medium are embedded, and is not conducive to dynamic and indeterminate forms of interaction. Functionalism has become a standard metric in the evaluation of the successes and shortcomings of computer interfaces. The idea of leveraging experience in order to minimize the strain that the interface places on the users cognitive apparatus is a hallmark of user-centered design (Norman 1986, 1999; Norman and Draper 1986), and the extent to which the interface disappears from the users attention constitutes the key criteria for the success of such approaches. The model of computer interface design known as direct manipulation (Norman, Holland, and Hutchins 1986) 15the model in which the user drags graphical representations of files into graphical representations of folders, among other thingsalready has the aim of the usage enterprise built

15

For an implementation guide to the "direct manipulation" model of computer

interface design, see "The Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines" (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/HIGuidelines/HIGuidelines-2.html; accessed March 20, 2006).

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into the blanketing term; i.e., things work best when the user believes that, rather than manipulating symbolic abstractions, she is in fact working directly with the objects of the task domain. Its entirely possible that the functionalist approach is optimally effective across a broad range of routine computational task environments. In much the same way that it makes little sense to employ dynamic and indeterminate forms of interaction when landing an airplane, it makes little sense to do so when balancing a computerized bank account or uploading a file to a server. These are tasks in which the activity is better served by invariable representations, and in which the degree of efficiency with which the task may be accomplished is inversely proportional to the amount of user attention that is consumed by the interface. But there is a danger, with functionalism becoming something of a de facto standard in interaction design, that the functionalist approach is adopted in task environments where it is not well-suited. That is, in task environments where the task-at-hand is better served by a realizational approach. In thinking about designing interfaces for musical performance, we are dealing with such a task environment. Where Donald Norman and other key figures in user-centered design champion the disappearance of the interface, the realizational approach would suggest that the interface offers some form of resistance to the user; i.e., that it should be irrevocably present. At first glance, this would seem to be at odds with the notion of flow. One of the key aspects of this paradigmatically embodied form of activity is its immediacy; and it would seem self-evident that the more the

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medium obtrudes in use, the less im-mediate the activity. Its at this point that its useful to draw a distinction between embodied action and enaction. While the sense of embodiment may be enhanced, or even optimal, when the agent successfully responds to cognitive challenges, such cognitive challenges are not prerequisite to embodied activity. For example, the sense of im-mediacy experienced when the agent is immersed in the act of hammeringthe sense that the hammer is not a distinct object, but an extension of the agents sensorimotor mechanismis indicative of that agents embodiment in action. But once the agent has acquired a sufficient degree of performative competence at hammering, the task ceases to present her with cognitive challenges. Hammering may be immediate and immersive, but it is not necessarily engaging. And it is in this that the hammer is not a realizational interface, and hammering is not enactive. To return to Francisco Varelas formulation, enaction involves the bringing forth of a world. The cognitive dimension is central to the process, and it is precisely where enaction and realization coincide. This raises an obvious question: if performance with conventional acoustic musical instruments is enactive, exactly how is the potential for realization embedded in the the instrumental interface? Or, how is that, say, a violin is substantively different to a hammer? The short answer is in the way in which the musicians intentionality is coupled to the instruments specific and immanent kinds of resistance. As the musician transmits kinetic energy into the mechanism, the instrument responds with proportionate energy; energy that is experienced by the musician as sound, haptic resistance, weight, and so on. There is a push and pull between musician and instrument. Over a sustained period of time, the musician adapts her bodily dispositions to the ways in which the instrument
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resists; i.e., to the instruments dynamical responsiveness. Its important to note that these adaptations, as much as they are determined by the resistance offered by the instrument, are also determined by the musicians intentionality. Its because the musician sets out to realize somethingto actively participate in embodied practices of significationthat her adaptation follows a unique trajectory, and the cognitive dimension continues to be central to the process of adaptation. But this still doesnt provide a satisfactory explanation of how the potential for realization is somehow embodied in one interface but not another. The hammer, like the violin, offers resistance to the agent. At one level, then, it would seem meaningless to talk of functional and realizational interfaces, and instead to view the entire process as a matter of the agents intentionality; functionalism would correspond to a functional attitude, and realization would likewise correspond to a realizational attitude. But this view does not consider the specific dynamic properties of resistance that are embodied in the interface. Rather, it presumes a neutrality of the interface to human intentionality, and ignores the constitutive role that the interface plays in the emergence of intentional and behavioral patterns. An agent could very well set about developing a musical performance practice with a hammer, carefully adapting her bodily dispositions to its dynamic properties of resistance over a period of many years of thoughtful rehearsal. But its likely that, at some point, she will either abandon the instrument for a medium that offers greater potential for realization, or she will make modifications to the instrument that would better serve that realizational potential.

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To return to Feenbergs specification, both technical objects and subjects i.e., artifacts and humansare constituted through an ongoing process of mutual specification and determination. The hammer has been constituted to serve a largely predetermined functional agenda: hammering. As such, it is advantageous that the hammer, considered as interface, presents minimal cognitive demands on the agent. Although music has its obvious functional uses in late capitalist society, the model of musical performance that is of specific interest to the present study is realizational; it assumes open-ended, fluid, and at least partly indeterminate processes of signification, and as such requires the ongoing cognitive involvement of the musician. A majority of conventional acoustic musical instruments have been constituted in such a way that the dynamic properties of their resistance are sufficiently complex, and at the same time sufficiently coherent, that they coincide optimally with the musicians intentionality. In requiring that the musicians ongoing cognitive involvement is central to the process of adaptation to the instruments dynamics, the potential for realizationfor embodied forms of signification, and for the bringing forth of a worldis effectively maximized. Approaches to digital musical instrument design that set out to model the dynamics of conventional acoustic instruments by and large circumvent the pitfalls of de facto functionalism. In the simulation of the various networks of excitors and resonators that constitute the physical mechanisms of acoustic instruments, and in the carefully considered mapping of the parameters of those synthesis primitives to tactile controllers, the integration of force feedback within the controller apparatus, and so on, an interface is constituted that comes close to the realizational potential of the real world instrument that it models. But the
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main focus of this study is to outline a foundation for the design of digital musical instruments that is more general than the physical modeling of existing instruments. And while there is much to be learned through analyzing the dynamical properties of conventional instruments, the basic idea is nonetheless to arrive at a practice that fully engages the new prospects for performance that are indigenous to computing media. This is why I have considered it important to distinguish between functional and realizational modes of interaction. The discourse of functionalism is implicit to the discourse of conventional humancomputer interaction design. As I have attempted to show, this can only be an impediment to arriving at technologies that maximize the potential for realization. In the specific case of musical performance, this means interfaces that embody the prospect of enaction. This calls for an alternative discourse, and alternative approaches to design.

2.6

Conclusion

To reiterate my key criteria from Chapter 1: embodied activity is situated, timely, multimodal, and engaging. The sense of embodiment over a history of interactions within a phenomenal domain emerges at the point where these various constraints intersect. This is not just a matter of action, but rather a matter of the various and complex dependencies between action, perception, and cognition. Or, in a purely enactivist sense, of the inseparability of action, perception, and cognition.

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What I have set out to show in this chapter is the various ways in which the computer-as-it-comes is a far from ideal medium in terms of meeting the criteria of embodied activity. The objectivist foundations of conventional HCI presume a strong separation between user and device, and situate the user squarely outside the interactional domain. The WIMP model serves to enforce this separation, and at the same time to regulate the actions of the user in such a way that time is discretized into repeating units of sensing and acting, where the locus of interaction is almost invariably unimodal. Further, the predominant notion of human-computer interaction design, which would aim to reduce the cognitive load on the agent and make the interface disappear from use, presumes a model of activity that is anything but engaging or challenging to the agent. When all or most of these criteria fail to be met, there is, in my view, no possibility for the kind of interactive and circular processes of emergence that are characteristic of enaction, or embodied cognition. To arrive at an enactive model of musical interaction, then, we will need to systematically rethink the world models that are embedded in the interface to the computer-as-it-comes. Overcoming the disconnect that the computer-as-it-comes enforces between human and instrument will require elaborating an alternative world model, and then looking at the ways in which such a model could be materialized in an instrument that would necessarily be something other than the-computer-as-it-comes. This will be my task for the remainder of the essay.

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Enaction

The body is our general medium for having a world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

3.1

Two Persistent Dualisms

In Chapter 2, I suggested that it would make little sense, when examining an interactional context with a view to enactive process, to draw hard dividing lines between action and cognition, or between body and mind. But these hard dividing lines persist in our language, and therefore also in any provisional description of the elements and processes of enaction. I also suggested that it makes little sense to discuss agent and environment in isolation, and instead stressed the inseparability of one from the other, particularly when attempting to discern the adaptive process that sees a complex set of ever-more refined skills, dispositions and behaviors emerge over a history of interactions. But in any attempt to describe such interactions, our descriptions inevitably land squarely at the boundary between agent and environment. And so in the same way that we

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insert a hard dividing line between body and mind, we tacitly delineate a neat separation between body and world. On the face of it, it would seem that our language, permeated as it is by the inherent dualisms of Western philosophical and scientific discourse, will ultimately lead us back to a primary disconnect. Or rather, it will lead us to two disconnects: between mind and body, and between body and world. This presents a problem. As long as the body is opposed to both mind and world, its difficult to describe, much less defend, any notion of direct experience. Disconnection would seem to be the order of the day. But while philosophical language may be geared in such a way that describing experience necessarily involves dualist, abstract and objectivist terms, it does not necessarily follow that direct experiencehowever that may be defineddoes not factor among those varieties of human experience for which we may or may not already have an adequate terminology. The specific variety of experience that Ive set out to describethis paradigmatically embodied, immersive and engaged experienceis fundamentally about activities that are always in a state of becoming, and which are therefore not at all easy to define in dualist, abstract and objectivist terms. Enaction involves a temporality in which relations are constantly in flux, and in which new systems and structures continuously emerge and disappear in the midst of interactional unfolding. In other words, it involves the processual transformation of the past into the future through the intermediary of transitional forms that in themselves have no permanent substance (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991: 116). The directness of experience, then, resides in the nowness of the experiential present. It is a variety of experience that comes prior to description, and prior to any clear
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determination of the subject, or of those objects and opportunities for action that make up that (transitional) subjects environment. In attempting to define direct experience, then, we encounter a paradox. Direct experience implies a provisional and temporary state of being that is always and necessarily resistant to ontological reduction. I would even go so far as to say that the nowness of the lived present is that which makes direct experience, by definition, preontological. But as soon as we attempt to describe the systems and structures of direct experience, we introduce ontological categories. Its in this that we see the intrinsic paradox of the description: there can be no notion of that which is direct without casting experience in abstract terms. This is likely to be the source of some confusion. And given that one of the primary motivations behind the present study is to outline a philosophical foundation for design, it will not help if the key philosophical concepts are poorly defined or potentially misleading. Fortunately, questions such as these are not without precedent; there is a branch of philosophy that has dealt systematically with direct experience, and it has done so within the context of a well-defined dualist discourse. In the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl,1 the existential phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and in the latter day

Although Husserl does not figure very significantly in this study, I mention him

because he is acknowledged as the founding figure of European phenomenology, and had a direct influence on the thinking of both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.

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reworking of both European and Buddhist phenomenology2 in enactive cognitive science and so-called postphenomenology,3 the apparent paradox of a dualistic description of unreflective behaviour is dealt with comprehensively. Phenomenology, in its various manifestations, is a vast and complex field, and its beyond the scope of this essay to cover any of its myriad branches of inquiry in any significant manner. However, there are two key concepts, from two quite different moments in the phenomenological tradition, which are particularly useful to the model of interaction that I am attempting to describe. Double embodiment and structural couplingboth of which terms already point to a fundamental dualism prior to their elaborationrespectively address the mind/body and body/world problems in direct experience. In outlining them here, I hope to clear up any confusion as to how the dualism that resides in any description of embodied action is substantively different from the disembodied dualism that lies at the heart of the computationalist perspective. This should bring us to a point where, after having established a disconnect in our descriptions, we come to see how that disconnect ceases to exist in the flux of

The philosophy of Nagarjuna, for example, and of the Madhyamika tradition in

Buddhist thought, figures significantly in Varela, Rosch and Thompson's outline of "codependent arising," and its implications for subjectivity (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991).
3

Postphenomenology is a term introduced by, and most often associated with,

philosopher Don Ihde (Ihde 1983, 1990, 1991, 1993, 2002).

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embodied action, and in the experiential merging of self and world. I should note that I am not attempting to construct a new theory of the mind/body problem here, or even to weigh into the debate. Rather, the objective is pragmatic: to outline some core theoretical issues with a view to opening up a space for new digital musical instrument design scenarios.

3.2

Double Embodiment

As long as the body is defined in terms of existence in-itself, it functions uniformly like a mechanism, and as long as the mind is defined in terms of pure existence for-itself, it knows only objects arrayed before it. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

In his analysis of tool use in Being and Time (Heidegger [1927] 1962), Heidegger draws a famous distinction between the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand. The ready-to-hand indicates an essentially pragmatic relation between user and tool. It is when the tool disappears, i.e., when it has the status of equipment, that the user engages the task environment via the ready-to-hand. The relation, then, is not about a human subject and an object of perception. Rather, it is about that objects withdrawal into the experiential unity of the actional context:
The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our

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everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work. (Heidegger [1927] 1962: 99)

The ready-to-hand implies an engaged and embodied flow of activity. The human is caught up in what Hubert Dreyfus has called absorbed coping (Dreyfus 1993: 27). Its only when this flow of activity is disturbed by some kind of technological breakdown that the apparently seamless continuity between user and tool is broken. In the moment of breaking down the tool becomes un-ready-to-hand, or, in Heideggers more often used term, present-at-hand:
Anything which is un-ready-to-hand is disturbing to us, and enables us to see the obstinacy of that with which we must concern ourselves in the first instance before we do anything else. With this obstinacy, the presence-at-hand of the ready-to-hand makes itself known in a new way as the Being of that which lies before us and calls for our attending to it. (Heidegger [1927] 1962: 102)

The hammer appears as an object of consciousness, i.e., it acquires hammerness, only if it breaks or slips from grasp or mars the wood, or if there is a nail to be driven and the hammer cannot be found (Winograd and Flores 1986: 36). Prior to the technological breakdown, then, the hammer is invisibly folded into the continuum of direct experience. It has no objectness in itself, but rather disappears into the purposefulness of action. The moment of its acquiring the status of object coincides with a disturbance to the accomplishment of the purpose for which the activity, in the first instance, was undertaken:

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When an assignment has been disturbedwhen something is unusable for some purposethen the assignment becomes explicit. (Heidegger [1927] 1962: 105)

Hubert Dreyfus recasts Heideggers distinction between the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand in psychological terms. He suggests that it is only when purposeful activity is disturbed that a conscious subject with self-referential mental states directed toward determinate objects with properties gradually emerges (Dreyfus 1991: 71). That is, direct, immediate experience is supplanted by abstract and reflective experience when the tool user is necessitated by a breakdown to perceive the tool in abstract terms, and to reflect on the context in which action and intention is embedded. There is a back-andforth in experience, then, between direct and abstract modes of engaging the world. That both modes are experienced by the same body points to a fundamental duality of embodied experience, or a double embodiment.4

I borrow the term "double embodiment" from Varela, Thompson and Rosch's The

Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991), who in turn base their coinage on Merleau-Ponty's notion of embodiment: We hold with Merleau-Ponty that Western scientific culture requires that we see our bodies both as physical structures and as lived, experiential structuresin short, as both "outer" and "inner," biological and phenomenological. These two sides of embodiment are obviously not opposed. Instead, we continuously circulate back and forth between them. Merleau-Ponty recognized that we cannot understand this circulation without a detailed investigation of its fundamental axis, 57

At first glance, it would seem contradictory to speak of abstract reflection as a subset of embodied experience. It does not, for example, satisfy the criteria of embodied activity that I laid out in Chapter 1. Further, abstract reflection would seem to be more or less identical in function to the disembodied reasoning of the computationalist model of cognition that I outlined in Chapter 2. There are two critical points here in arriving at a fairly subtle, and inherently paradoxical, distinction. First, by locating cognitive process entirely within the mechanisms of the body as lived, the body must necessarily contain cognition. To the extent that abstract reflection forms part of lived experienceat the moment of a technological breakdown, for examplethe experience of disembodiment is quite literally embodied by the reflective subject. Second, the computationalist model of cognition does not account for unreflective experience. According to the computationalist perspective, all activity is mediated by internal representations of the task domain, and reasoning about potential courses of action. With double embodiment, such a state of affairs arises only when the flow of unreflective activity is interrupted. An enactive model of cognition does not, then, dismiss the reflective state of disembodied reason. Rather, it encompasses it within the lived experience of the doubly embodied agent at large in the world. This seemingly paradoxical state of affairs is captured in Merleau-Pontys concept of the practical cogito (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2004); an idea that, in a

namely, the embodiment of knowledge, cognition, and experience. (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991:xv-xvi)

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single turn of phrase, encompasses both direct action and abstract reflection. For Merleau-Ponty, as for Heidegger, the phenomenological project is in the first instance concerned with reversing the Cartesian axiom; with the substitution of practical understanding for abstract understanding, and with the placement of an I can prior to the I think (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2004: 137). The crucial factor in addressing the apparent contradiction between direct action and abstract reflection is to situate both within the context of the unfolding of activity and cognitive skill in a temporal context:
There is, indeed, a contradiction, as long as we operate within being, but the contradiction disappearsif we operate in time, and if we manage to understand time as the measure of being. (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2004: 330)

Embodied being, then, encompasses both reflective and unreflective experience. And in the unfolding of being that conforms to the enactive model of cognition, These two sides of embodiment are obviously not opposed. Instead, we continuously circulate back and forth between them (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991: xv). Indeed, it is through this circulating back and forth, through what Varela et al. have termed a fundamental circularity (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991), that perceptual, actional and cognitive skills develop, hand in hand. Enaction does admit a mind/body dualism, then: it encompasses both the body as a lived, experiential structure and the body as the context or milieu of cognitive mechanisms (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991: xvi). But the moment in which the agent becomes subjectively conscious of her body, and of her bodys objective relations to the objects arrayed before it, is only ever

59

transitory. At the moment that activity resumes, the body recedes into the background, and its objects withdraw into the immediacy of the task. As I argued in Chapter 2, the computer-as-it-comes precludes embodied forms of activity. It does not allow for a motility that is situated, timely, multimodal, engaging. In short, it keeps the user in a state of disconnection from the tool; a disconnect that is reinforced by the symbolic representationalist underpinnings of conventional computer interfaces. What I have endeavored to show here is that this disconnect is a factor in experience, and so when turning to design, it should not be discounted. But that form of direct experience that Heidegger termed the ready-to-handa notion that is more or less synonymous with the notion of embodied activity that I outlined in Chapter 1, and is our natural way of galvanizing tools and working within our everyday environments is missing from the conventional interactional paradigms with the computer-as-itcomes.5 While some authors have suggested that we should explicitly factor the Heideggerean breakdown into our music interface models (Di Scipio 1997; Hamman 1997, 1999), they also place emphasis on non-real-time music production (composition), rather than the processes of real-time music production (performance) with which I am specifically concerned. I suggest, rather, that with a view to designing enactive instruments, attention should be

Winograd and Flores present an extensive analysis of the conventional metaphors of

computer science in relation to a Heideggerean ontology in Understanding Computers and Cognition (Winograd and Flores 1986).

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directed at maximizing the potential for fully engaged and direct experience. As with the hammer, or with any other tool, we can expect that breakdowns will happen in the course of everyday practice. Such breakdowns are essential, for example, to the incremental adaptive process of learning to play a conventional acoustic instrument.6 My focus, then, when turning to issues of design, will not be directed at engineering breakdowns, but rather at engineering the potential for the desired kind of breakdowns. In terms of the technical implementation, the measure will be resistance.

3.3

Structural Coupling

The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

Although Ive already suggested that double embodiment and structural coupling address, respectively, mind/body and body/world dualisms, it would be more accurate to say that both double embodiment and structural coupling address the mind/body/world continuum with an emphasis on different processes. The world

Later in the chapter (3.5) I outline this adaptive process in detail with specific

reference to the role of breakdowns.

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obviously figures in the double embodiment analysis: it is the context in which action is embedded. In much the same way, the mind figures in structural coupling: it is the locus of cognitive emergence over a history of interactions between body and world. But where the emphasis in double embodiment is on the oscillatory nature of mental engagement in an interactional context, the emphasis in structural coupling is on the circular processes of causation and specification that pertain between the agent and the environment. More specifically, structural coupling draws a dividing line between body and world in description and schematizationi.e., it enforces a separationin order to demonstrate the inseparability of one from the other in the unfolding of a coextensive interactional milieu, and in the emergence of performative and cognitive patterns and competencies. In early formulations (Maturana and Varela 1980, 1987), the concept of structural coupling was applied to evolutionary biology. It presented an analysis of the interactions between an organism and its environment (where the environment may include other organisms), with a view to their mutual adaptation and coevolution. More specifically, it addressed the circular and reciprocal nature of these interactions. The coupling between organism and environment is structural because, as the organism and the environment exchange matter and energy, their respective structures, and hence the structure of their interactions, are changed as a function of the exchange. The process is captured neatly in Maturana and Varelas definition of an autopoietic machine:
An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that 62

produce the components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. (Maturana and Varela 1980: 78-79)

Over a history of exchanges between organism and environment, there is an increasing regularization of structure, i.e., a continuous realization of the network of processes, such that both organism and environment are more viably adapted to productive exchange, and such that those exchanges strengthen the conditions for continued interaction. Structural coupling is a key component of the enactivist model of cognition. In Varela, Rosch and Thompsons formulation, it is the very mechanism by which cognitive properties emerge:
Question 1: What is cognition? Answer: Enaction: A history of structural coupling that brings forth a world. (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991: 206)

The world that is brought forth, or enacted, by the agent, traverses the divide between agent and environment. In contrast to the computationalist subject who reasons about an external world in an internal domain of symbolic representationthe enactive subject actively realizes the world through the connection of the nervous system to the sensory and motor surfaces which, in turn, connect the embodied agent to the environment within the course of action. The fully developed notion of structural coupling, then, emphasizes the

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inseparability of agent and environment in embodied cognition, but at the same time locates the points at which agent and environment intersect, and offers an explanation as to how repetitive contacts at these points of intersection can lead to incrementally more complex states of functioning on the part of the cognitive system. There is a certain push and pull of physical forces between agent and environment that constitutes a critical aspect of their structural coupling. In other words, structural coupling implies physical constraints and feedback. The contingencies and specificities of the agents embodiment form one such constraint, and it is a constraint that is in an ongoing state of transformation as the agent acquires and develops motor skills, or finds herself in new or changing environments with new or changing actional priorities. Physical constraints also exist within the environment, and these forces act upon the agents body within the course of activity, and so play a critical role in the emergence of embodied practices and habits. This push and pull between agent and environment has a dynamic contour, and this is where the hard dividing line that we may draw between them must necessarily be qualified. The dividing line is rather more pliable; a quality that is tidily encapsulated in a schematization by Hillel Chiel and Randall Beer (Figure 3.1).

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Figure 3.1. Interactions between the nervous system, the body (sensorimotor surfaces), and the environment (from Chiel and Beer (1997)). Chiel and Biers commentary: The nervous system (NS) is embedded within a body, which in turn is embedded within the environment. The nervous system, the body, and the environment are each rich, complicated, highly structured dynamical systems, which are coupled to one another, and adaptive behavior emerges from the interactions of all three systems.

In Chiel and Beers diagram, the dividing lines between body and environment, and between nervous system and body, are clearly distinct, but they are not rigid. The push and pull between each of the components in the interactional domain is indicated by projecting triangular regions. Its clear that a push on one side of the body-environment divide results in a proportionate pull on the other, and vice versa. The body consists of sensory inputs and motor outputs, and contains the nervous system, which is connected to the sensorimotor surface through the same dynamical push-pull patterns that connect the body to the environment. There is, then, a fluid complementarity between environment,
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body, and nervous system, of which Chiel and Beers diagram provides an instantaneous snapshot. To capture the properly dynamical nature of this complementarity, the diagram would need to be animated. We would then see the projecting triangular regions extend and contract in regular (though not necessarily periodic) oscillatory patterns, and these motions would provide a view of the continuous balancing of energies between agent and environment as the play of physically constrained action unfolds over time. These kinds of exchanges may be more or less stable in terms of the impact of environmental dynamics on agent dynamics, and vice versa. And they may demand more or less of the agents cognitive resources, depending on the potential complexity of balancing the intentionality of the agent with the environmental contingencies. What we see is a transfer functiona mapfrom agent to environment and back again, that, from one interaction to the next, may exhibit linear, nonlinear, or even random behavior. Beer has suggested that when embodied agent and environment are coupled through interaction, they form a nonautonomous dynamical system (Beer 1996, 1997). Its a perspective that has also been adopted by a handful of cognitive scientists as an explanatory mechanism for the emergence of cognitive structures through interactional dynamics (Hutchins 1995; Thelen 1994). Although it doesnt form an explicit part of Varela and Maturanas original formulation, the dynamical systems approach provides a potentially useful way of both understanding and schematizing structural coupling. I will return to this point in my outline of implementational models in Chapter 4.

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There are two fundamental and seemingly contradictory points to viewing interactions between an embodied agent and its environment as a process of structural coupling: 1. to emphasize the inseparability of agent and environment, and 2. to locate the points at which agent and environment intersect, i.e. their bounding surfaces. The danger with the analytic part of this formulation is that, as soon as weve drawn the dividing line between agent and environment, its rather easy to view them in isolation, and to understand their respective behaviors as self-contained properties of autonomous systems. This lands us, more or less, back within the computationalist model of rationally guided action. Therefore, its precisely the point at which the mechanics of the agentenvironment connection need to be described. We will see a disconnect in schematizations of both the computationalist and the enactive models of action. On one side, the agent, on the other, the world. But what distinguishes the enactive model from the computationalist model is the formation of a larger unity between agent and world through dynamical processes of embodied interaction and adaptation. These processes are characterized by crossings of the divide, by the push and pull between coupled physical systems, and by a form of experience that, rather than being lived through a world of abstract inner contemplation, is lived directly at the points where the sensorimotor system coincides with the environment in which it is embedded. Although we can delineate the boundary between agent and environment in an abstract diagram of their interactional milieu, such a diagram will not capture the experiential aspect of embodied interaction. The agent does not feel herself to be separate from the world in which she is acting but, rather,
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is intimately folded into its dynamics and processes. The bringing forth of a world, that is, of an organismic continuity between agent and environment, amounts to the moment at which the original severance, or disconnect, ceases to factor in the agents experience. The body is not as it in fact is, as a thing in objective space, but rather constitutes a system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal place defined by its task and situation (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2004: 250). I would argue that, as a matter of definition, when the five criteria of embodied activity (Chapter 1) are met, a structurally coupled system is inevitably formed.7 To this extent (and in keeping with Varela, Thompson and Roschs formulation), structural coupling implies enaction, and vice versa. Structural coupling between performer and instrument will, therefore, be key to the model of enactive musical performance that I am proposing, and an essential criterion in design.

To be more precise, the first four criteria of embodied activity would form a

structurally coupled system, and the fifth--embodiment is an emergent phenomenon-would come for free. As Thelen and Smith point out (Thelen 1994), the emergence of cognitive, perceptual and actional abilities constitute the teleological dimension of structural coupling.

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3.4

Towards an Enactive Model of Interaction

The key theoretical components of the essay have now been presented. But before turning to issues of the design and implementation of enactive digital musical instruments, it may prove useful to outline the various models of interaction that Ive discussed to this point in the form of diagrams. The leap from theory to implementation is almost always a shaky endeavor, and the models that I present here may serve as a provisional and necessarily speculative bridging of the gap between theory and praxis. To that end, the diagrams focus specifically on human-computer interaction, but remain both general and nonspecific in terms of hardware and software implementation details (i.e., the interface). Its the dynamics of the various models of interaction between human and computer that form the key concern, with a view to distinguishing their various implications for the development of human cognition and action. The underlying rationale, then, is to arrive at a candidate model of enactive interaction, with the intention of holding this model in view when shifting the focus to implementation. There is a basic model of human-computer interaction (figure 3.2) that can be taken to hold for all subsequent models. The human performs actions at the inputs to the computer which cause changes to the state of the computers programs. In turn, the computer transmits output signals representing the state of its programs which are perceived by the human.

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HUMAN
PERCEPTION

COMPUTER
OUTPUT

PROGRAMS

ACTION

INPUT

Figure 3.2. The basic model of the human-computer interaction loop. S represents the map from the state of the computers output devices to the humans sensory inputs, and M represents the map from the humans motor activities to the state of the computers input devices. Together, the input and output devices constitute the interface to the programs running on the computer.

The basic model is, however, incomplete. The human perceives and acts, and therefore demonstrates intentionality. But there is nothing to link perception to action. That is, although a cognitive dimension is implied, the model does not account for it. In fact, the usefulness of the model lies solely in specifying the basic mechanics of human-computer interaction, and as these mechanics can be assumed to be unchanging for all subsequent models,8 it can also be assumed

To say that the basic mechanics is unchanging is not to say that the interfaces will be

identical. The basic mechanics can be taken to mean the maps from output to perception, 70

that the subsequent models will be distinguished solely by cognitive considerations. For present purposes, this means the map between perception and action. To make the step from the basic model to the conventional model of humancomputer interaction, we need only insert human reasoning between perceiving and acting (figure 3.3).

HUMAN
PERCEPTION

COMPUTER
OUTPUT

REASONING

PROGRAMS

ACTION

INPUT

Figure 3.3. The basic model extended to include the model of human activity in conventional HCI. Human actions follow after inner reasoning about sensory inputs, resulting in a sequential chain of actions, and a

and from action to input. Different interfaces will result in different map dynamics, and these dynamics will in turn carry different sets of implications for cognition, perception and action.

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segmentation of the flow of time (see Chapter 2.4). This model is paradigmatic of what I have termed the computer-as-it-comes.

We now have a schematization of the Cartesian subject in the midst of interaction, and its interesting to note the upside-down symmetry on either side of the human/computer divide.9 The conventional model presumes that the human reasons about her interactions with the computer in an inner world of mental abstraction. There is therefore an inevitable time delay between perception and action, the duration of which is simply as long as it takes to perform the necessary mental computations. Although they are not detailed in figure 3.3, it can be assumed that the input and output devices of conventional HCI serve to reinforce the computationalist ontology from which conventional HCI derives. To this extent, input devices are ordinarily monomodal and geared to a single focal point of motor activity (from one moment to the next, either the mouse or the keyboard), and output devices are ordinarily visuocentric and geared to a single focal display point (the cursor). When these factors combine in the form of a device, we have what I have termed the computer-as-it-comes. It can effectively be guaranteed that interactions with the computer-as-it-comes will be disembodied, at least according to the minimal criteria I set down for embodied activity in Chapter 1.

In the spirit of mechanistic philosophy, we could even relabel Perception,

Reasoning, and Action, respectively as Input, Programs, and Output.

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In Chapter 2, I drew a distinction between functional and realizational interfaces. The distinction rests on the manner in which the interface elicits particular varieties of action and thought from the human user. While the terminology places explicit emphasis on the interface and how it is constituted, the immediate concern lies with the implications of the interface for the emergence of cognitive, perceptual and actional patterns. In schematizing the respective interactional paradigms of the functional and realizational interfaces, then, I have added a further cognitive dimension to the human side of the computer-as-it-comes model, while the computer side has remained unchanged. In the diagram of the functional model of interaction (figure 3.4), the added dimension is labelled Knowledge. This knowledge can be considered offline with regard to activity. That is, its an abstract quantity that exists prior to interactions with the computer, and while it directly informs the ways in which the human subject perceives and reasons, knowledge is accessed, rather than constituted, within the course of action. It can also be assumed that there are no real-time constraints on the accessing of this knowledge, and that this aspect reinforces the sense, in user experience, that the knowledge being galvanized is offline.

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HUMAN
KNOWLEDGE

COMPUTER

PERCEPTION

OUTPUT

REASONING

PROGRAMS

ACTION

INPUT

Figure 3.4. The human-computer interaction loop with the functional interface (see 2.5). The humans knowledge is leveraged by the abstractions that comprise the computers interface, and this knowledge is galvanized to guide perception and reasoning, leading to appropriate action. The functional interface is deterministic; i.e., the goal of the taskat-hand is known in advance, and the interface is designed to lead to the accomplishment of this goal while placing minimal cognitive demands on the human.

I noted in Chapter 2 that functionalism is something of a standard in conventional interaction design. Through leveraging existing user knowledge, and thereby minimizing the cognitive load, the task domain and its end goals are made as transparent as possible. While the approach has a great many advantages for routine activities with computers, it is not advantageous to activities that are dynamic or nondeterministic by nature.
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In figure 3.5, Knowledge is relabelled Realization, and the links between Realization and Perception, and Realization and Reasoning, are now bidirectional.

HUMAN
REALIZATION

COMPUTER

PERCEPTION

OUTPUT

REASONING

PROGRAMS

ACTION

INPUT

Figure 3.5. The human-computer interaction loop with the realizational interface (see 2.5). The key difference between the realizational and the functional interface lies in the cognitive demands they place on the human. Whereas human knowledge can be considered static in functional interactions, it is dynamic in realizational interactions. The realizational interface is nondeterministic; i.e., it brings with it a continuing potential for new encounters and uses, and human knowledge continues to expand over a history of interactions. Because the term knowledge implies a fixed state of knowing, it is substituted in the diagram by the more dynamic and fluid realization. 75

The term knowledge implies a static corpus of known facts. Its precisely this corpus of knowns on which the functional interface draws. The realizational interface, on the other hand, offers resistance to the user, deliberately prompting her to new modes of thinking about the task domain. Hence the substitution of the more dynamic and fluid term realization. In figure 3.5, a reasoning stage still intervenes between the perceiving and acting stages. According to the criteria of embodied activity, then, the model represents a disembodied mode of interaction. Nonetheless, an important step has been taken towards the enactive model. By introducing resistance to the interfacea resistance that requires the human to fully engage in the activitythe shift is effected from a static and deterministic model of activity to one that is dynamic and nondeterministic. While realization is offline to the activity, it still requires that the human commit continuous and significant cognitive resources to the task, and thus opens the possibility for the on-going generation of new meanings and modes of thought. I have defined embodied activity as a state of being that consists in a merging of action and awareness. That is to say, there is a seamless continuity between perceiving and acting, experienced as flow. In figure 3.6, the boundaries between perception, reasoning and action are collapsed, and the continuity between perceiving and acting is indicated by the label Perceptually Guided Action.

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HUMAN
S
PERCEPTUALLY GUIDED ACTION

COMPUTER
OUTPUT

PROGRAMS

INPUT

Figure 3.6. Embodied Interaction. The perceiving/reasoning/acting sequence has been collapsed into a fully integrated model of activity. Perception and action constitute a unity, labelled here as Perceptually Guided Action. This corresponds to the flow of embodied activity (see 1.2), and to Heideggers ready-to-hand (see 3.2); there is a merging of action and awareness, and the sense of disconnect between human and computer ceases to factor in experience.

This is the first of the schematizations in which the human is represented as a unity, and it can be assumed that the experience of oneness involves the loss of any sense of disconnect with the computer. Ive argued that such a mode of activity is precluded by the computer-as-it-comes, and that this has proven a major stumbling block in arriving at designs for digital musical instruments that allow for embodied modes of interaction. The model of activity corresponds to Heideggers ready-to-hand, or in Hubert Dreyfus paraphrase, absorbed coping, or, in the rubric that Ive used throughout the essay, embodied action. As with
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the standard model of human-computer interaction (figure 3.2), there is no explicit focus on conscious mechanisms. Indeed, the distinguishing aspect of the ready-to-hand is that it is an unconscious, unreflective mode of behavior. In Chapter 2, I suggested that what distinguishes embodied action from enaction is the realizational dimension. That is, that while the sense of embodiment may be optimal when cognitive challenges are placed upon the human agent, such challenges are not prerequisite to embodiment. Cognitive realization is, however, prerequisite to enaction. To make the step from embodied action to enaction, then, Realization is connected to Perceptually Guided Action through a bidirectional path (figure 3.7).

HUMAN
REALIZATION

COMPUTER

S
PERCEPTUALLY GUIDED ACTION

OUTPUT

PROGRAMS

INPUT

Figure 3.7. Enaction. Human and computer are structurally coupled systems (see 3.3). Enaction implies an embodied model of interaction with 78

a view to cognitive and actional realization. In the enactivist view, cognition is an embodied phenomenon. It arises through physical interactions, and in turn shapes the trajectory of future interactions.

Theres a symmetry between the enactive model and that of the realizational interface (figure 3.5): both include a realizational dimension that is tied, through reciprocal patterns of determination, to perception and action. And in both instances, realization is tightly correlated to the resistance that the interface offers to the human user, and to the cognitive challenges this resistance presents. But where the realizational interface solicits a mode of activity that is disembodied and offline, the enactive interface solicits time-constrained improvised responses that are embodied and online. Another way to view this is as the difference between, in Elizabeth Prestons terminology, representational and non-representational intentionality (Preston 1988). Where the realizational interface is concerned with engineering a representational breakdowni.e. deliberately causing a reappraisal of the representations that comprise the interface; an activity that necessarily involves reasoning, and is therefore disembodied and offlinethe enactive interface is concerned with soliciting new responses without recourse to inner representations.10 That is, the interface is

10

There are continuing disagreements among cognitive scientists and philosophers of

mind as to whether "inner representations" play a part in direct experience. Although I take no position in the debate, for the purposes of the present study I assume that inner representations play no part in direct experience, as this makes it easier to distinguish between direct and abstract experience. If we were to stick with the idea that humans are 79

encountered directly rather than abstractly, in real time and real space, and human activity is embodied and online. In the enactive model, then, realization is an incremental process of cognitive regularization and awareness, stemming from forces that are directly registered through the body, and at the same time determining the emergent contour of the bodys unfolding patterns and trajectories. The enactive model of interaction represents the ideal performative outcome of the class of digital musical instruments that I am setting out to define and describe in this study. Before turning to design, however, its important to note that while the enactive model of interaction represents an idealized way of being in the performative moment, it does not represent the sum total of the performance practice. Rather, in keeping with Merleau-Pontys theory of double embodiment, that performance practice, in addition to the enactive model of interaction (figure 3.7), would also at various moments involve embodied action

storing the contents of their environment as inner representations at all times, then we could potentially draw the distinction between abstract and direct experience in terms of objective and deictic intentionality. Deictic representations were discussed in Chapter 2, but I will reiterate here. According to Philip Agre, "a deictic ontology ... can be defined only in indexical and functional terms, that is, in relations to an agent's spatial location, social position, or current and typical goals or projects (Agre 1997: 242)." With deictic intentionality, then, we do not relate to an object in terms of its objectness, but in terms of the role it plays in our activities. And it is because the object is so directly folded into the actional midst that we encounter it directly rather than abstractly.

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(figure 3.6), and offline realization (figure 3.5). Each of these modalities would constitute different ways of engaging the same instrument, and the human performer would routinely cross the lines that distinguish one modality from the next. There will be breakdowns, particularly in the learning stage, which shift awareness to the objectness of the instrument. The instrument will become present-at-hand; i.e., it will be encountered through a representational intentionality. Additionally, in the midst of embodied activity, it cannot be assumed that the instrument will provide endless novelty to the performer; particularly as, over the course of practice, she becomes more finely adapted to the instrumental dynamics. At such momentsagain, to borrow terminology from Heideggerthe instrument effectively disappears from use, and becomes readyto-hand. In everyday embodied practices, its not unusual for these experiential modalities to be engaged simultaneously. For example, a violinist breaks a string in the middle of performance, drawing the focus of her attention to the objectness of the instrument. At the same time, however, she continues playing on the remaining three strings. With the greater portion of available cognitive resources allocated to the instrumental breakdown, its likely that the act of playing proceeds without a great deal of reflective thought. We see then a coincidence of the present-at-hand and the ready-to-hand, as the intentionality of the performer is divided across different components of the same instrument. That the same human is able to divide the instantaneous allocation of cognitive resources into representational and nonrepresentational subcomponents is nothing extraordinary for a practiced, multi-tasking, doubly embodied performer. It is also something that happens as a matter of course in the
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development of any form of embodied practice, and therefore need not factor in design. In the particular case of what I have termed enactive digital musical instruments, then, it can be assumed that if the instrumental implementation engenders suitable conditions for the enactive model of interaction, the other modalitiesembodied action and offline realizationwill invariably follow. The practical implication for instrument design, then, is that the enactive model is the only one that need be kept in view.

3.5

The Discontinuous Unfolding of Skill Acquisition

In Merleau-Pontys phenomenology, human intentionality is fundamentally concerned with the bodys manner of relating to objects in the course of purposive activity. In the broadest sense of the term, it encompasses both representational and nonrepresentational intentional modes. In using the umbrella term intentionality, then, we can condense the enactive, embodied action, and offline realization models into a single integrated model, which I have termed enactive performance practice (figure 3.8). The model encompasses the interdependencies between perception, action and cognitive unfolding within the circumscribed interactional domain of instrumental practice.

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COGNITION

Time

HUMAN BODY

INSTRUMENT

Figure 3.8. Enactive performance practice. Human body and instrument are unities, and cognitive abilities emerge over time through the continuous and embodied circular interactions between them. As these cognitive abilities develop, there is an incremental regularization of the performative patterns of the body, and of the dynamics of the bodyinstrument interactions. I represents the map from human intentionality to the instrument, while R represents the map from the instruments reactions back to the human.

While the enactive performance practice model is too general to be useful in design, it does serve to encapsulate all the key facets of the interaction paradigm Ive set out to describe. The human acts purposefully through her body, exemplifying an intentionality. Her bodily actions are transduced by the instrument and lead to a reaction. The instrumental reactions are perceived by the human, and these perceptions, as they are registered in the body, modulate her intentionality, and thus her ongoing reactions and bodily dispositions. The process could be schematized as a bidirectional exchange, but we get closer to
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the flux of the performance experience if the interactions are viewed as circular and continuous. The cognitive dimension is not independent of these interactions, but rather is folded into them through realization. Over time, cognitive abilities continue to develop, as the body continues to adapt to the dynamics of the interactional domain. Although cognition and the body are indicated as distinct entities in figure 3.8, this is solely for the purposes of clarity. It should be kept in mind that cognition is an embodied phenomenon, realized at the connections between the nervous system, the sensorimotor surfaces, and the environment.11 Enactive performance practice as Ive outlined it here is consistent with Merleau-Pontys notion of the intentional arc (see Chapter 2). The arc metaphor is interesting, as it implies a continuity in the acquisition of perceptual, actional and cognitive skills; a continuity that is also implied in the unbroken trajectory of cognitive unfolding in figure 3.8. As long as enactive performance practiceand also the intentional arccan be said to encompass representational and nonrepresentational modes, this doesnt present a problem. At the same time, however, the model does not accurately reflect the ways in which the modes of bodily relation to an instrument are transformed over the course of cognitive

11

In this essay, the environment can be taken to comprise the instrument, and an

idealized physical space in which the instrument's outputs might be optimally perceived by the human performer. In real practice, of course, the environment may include any manner of physical spaces, humans, other animals, etc. While such features of the environment will inevitably play a part in the emergence and formation of performer intentionality, it's beyond the scope of this study to factor them into consideration.

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unfolding; i.e. it does not account for the intrinsically discontinuous back-andforth between the present-at-hand and the ready-to-hand that characterizes the acquisition of skill. This is an especially important point when considering the acquisition of realizational skills, such as learning to play a musical instrument. Before moving on to issues of implementation, then, its worth considering the ways in which human bodily ways of being are transformed within the process of acquiring a specific skill. Ill do this by drawing out some correspondences between two texts, Hubert Dreyfus The Current Relevance of Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Embodiment (Dreyfus 1996), and David Sudnows Ways of the Hand (Sudnow 2001). Dreyfus sets out in his article to lay out more fully than Merleau-Ponty does, how our relation to the world is transformed as we acquire a skill (Dreyfus 1996:6).12 He does this by dividing the temporal unfolding of skill acquisition into five distinct stagesNovice, Advanced beginner, Competence, Proficient, and Expertisewhere each stage is characterized by specific bodily ways of relating to the task environment in question. Dreyfus assumes the case of an adult acquiring a skill by instruction (Dreyfus 1996:6), and illustrates his argument with two examples: learning to drive a car, and learning to play chess. In the discussion that follows, I will borrow from Dreyfus decomposition of the intentional arc into five distinct stages, but will illustrate the argument with an

12

The numbering system in citations of Dreyfus' article refer to the paragraph number

of the online text.

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example that is more immediately pertinent to the present study: learning to improvise with a musical instrument. Sudnows Ways of the Handa detailed first person production account of the gradual acquisition of skill as a jazz pianistis in this regard an ideal candidate. Dreyfus Novice stage begins with the reduction of the task environment into explicit representations of the elements of which the environment is composed:
Normally, the instruction process begins with the instructor decomposing the task environment into context-free features which the beginner can recognize without benefit of experience in the task domain. The beginner is then given rules for determining actions on the basis of these features, like a computer following a program. (Dreyfus 1996:7)

That the features of the environment are context-free implies that the focus of activity is directed towards connecting the body to the instrumenti.e., establishing a gripin the proper place and with the proper alignments, but without any explicit regard as to how these alignments will eventually fold into the context of embodied, time-constrained performance. For Sudnow, the features of the task environment were chords, and the proper alignments were the voicing of those chords:
In early lessons with my new teacher the topic was chord construction, or voicing, playing a chords tones in nicely distributed ways. (Sudnow 2001:12)

The proper place of the chords was determined by the specific configuration of piano keys that the hand would need to engage. Its interesting to note the

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substantial initial awkwardness that Sudnow describes in the complex of lookings and graspings that characterize this stage:
I would find a particular chord, groping to put each finger into a good spot, arranging the individual fingers a bit to find a way for the hand to feel comfortable, and, having gained a hold on the chord, getting a good grasp, Id let it go, then look back to the keyboardonly to find the visual and manual hold hadnt yet been well established. I had to take up the chord again in terms of its constitution, find the individual notes again, build it up from the scratch of its broken parts. (Sudnow 2001:12)

The mode of engagement here is clearly that of the present-at-hand. Each note of the chord is mentally associated with an individual finger before the hand gains a hold on the chord as a whole. The chord, thenthe initial context-free feature of the environmentis itself decomposed into individual features. And this decomposition demands an on-going coordination between an abstract mental image of the task at hand and the accomplishment of the task. As Sudnow notes, lots of searching and looking are first required (Sudnow 2001:12). In Dreyfus taxonomy, the Advanced beginner stage is characterized by the emergence of a degree of contextual recognition:
As the novice gains experience actually coping with real situations, he begins to note, or an instructor points out, perspicuous examples of meaningful additional aspects of the situation. After seeing a sufficient number of examples, the student learns to recognize them. Instructional maxims now can refer to these new situational aspects, recognized on the basis of experience, as well as to the

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objectively defined non-situational features recognizable by the novice. (Dreyfus 1996:10)

The situational aspects here point to an initial emergence of gestalts; i.e. of the tendency to regard coordinated actionssuch as the playing of a chordnot as the combined motions of individual figures, but as a single, integrated motion of the hands:
As my hands began to form constellations, the scope of my looking correspondingly grasped the chord as a whole, seeing not its note-for-noteness but its configuration against the broader visual field of the terrain. (Sudnow 2001:13)

Its important to note, however, that such gestalts remain limited to isolated and non-time-pressured events. The context that the performer is beginning to glimpse, then, remains offline. The perceptual recognition of places and alignments is beginning to occur at a higher level of scale, but this recognition is neither situated (in the sense that one place and alignment might lead to a next place and alignment, or that it might be solicited by some other pressing constraint in the environment, or both) nor timely (in the sense that the transition from one place and alignment to a next must satisfy timing constraints in the broader context of a performance). It is at the next stage of skill acquisition that such factors enter the equation. Dreyfus designation for the third stage of skill acquistionCompetenceis potentially misleading. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that competence emerges towards the end of the third stage, where the stage as a whole is characterized by a gradually increasing capacity for dealing with the
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online aspects of performance; i.e. for situated and timely musical utterances. The beginning of the third stage is marked, however, by anything but a sense of performative competence. Rather, the disparity between the level of skill accomplished thus far and a newly gained understanding of the larger context of performancei.e., its online aspectsleads to a sense of frustration. This frustration is borne specifically of the bodys inability to adequately respond to the seemingly overwhelming online demands of performance:
With more experience, the number of potentially relevant elements of a real-world situation that the learner is able to recognize becomes overwhelming. At this point, since a sense of what is important in any particular situation is missing, performance becomes nerve-wracking and exhausting, and the student might wonder how anybody ever masters the skill. (Dreyfus 1996:13)

Interestingly enough, Sudnows first public performance took place at precisely this stage in his development. Its worth quoting his account in full:
The music wasnt mine. It was going on all around me. I was in the midst of a music the way a lost newcomer finds himself suddenly in the midst of a Mexico City traffic circle, with no humor in the situation, for I was up there trying to do this jazz Id practiced nearly all day, there were friends Id invited to join me, and the musicians Id begun to know. I was on a bucking bronco of my own bodys doings, situated in the midst of these surrounding affairs. Between the chordchanging beat of my left hand at more or less regular intervals according to the chart, the melodic movements of the right, and the rather more smoothly managed and securely pulsing background of the bass player and drummer, there obtained the most alienative relations. (Sudnow 2001:33)

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The gap between motor intentionality and motor ability led to a music that was literally out of hand (Sudnow 2001:35). It also led to Sudnow shying away from further public performances for a period of several years. Dreyfus notes that the performer normally responds to the newly discovered enormity of the task at hand by adopting a hierarchical perspective, and by deciding upon a route that determines which elements of the situation are to be treated as important and which ones can be ignored (Dreyfus 1996:14). In short, the task is again reduced to individual components. But unlike the concrete components of activity that constitute the context-free features of the Novice stage, the components of the Competence stage are rather more contextbound:
The competent performer thus seeks new rules and reasoning procedures to decide upon a plan or perspective. But these rules are not as easily come by as the rules given beginners in texts and lectures. The problem is that there are a vast number of different situations that the learner may encounter, many differing from each other in subtle, nuanced, ways. There are, in fact, more situations than can be named or precisely defined so no one can prepare for the learner a list of what to do in each possible situation. Competent performers, therefore, have to decide for themselves what plan to choose without being sure that it will be appropriate in the particular situation. (Dreyfus 1996:15)

For Sudnow, the plan was to work towards a melodic intentionality by extending in practice his acquired embodied knowledge of isolated chords to patterned sequences of chords, as well as sequences comprised of the individual

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notes that those chords contain. Not coincidentally, this plan was decided upon without input from his teacher, or guidance from texts and lectures:
At first, and for some time, this was a largely conceptual process. Id think: major triad on the second note of the scale, now again, then diminished on the third and a repeat for the next, doing hosts of calculating and guidance operations of this sort in the course of play. (Sudnow 2001:43)

And in due course, gestalts began to emerge at the level of the sequence, rather than appearing solely at the level of the event:
A small sequence of notes was played, then a next followed. As the abilities of my hand developed, I found myself for the first time coming into position to begin to do such melodic work with respect to these courses. (Sudnow 2001:43)

The emergence of these gestalts is more or less equivalent to what Sudnow describes as the emergence of a melodic intentionality:
... an express aiming for sounds, was dependent in my experience upon the acquisition of facilities that made it possible, and it wasnt as though in my prior work I had been trying and failing to make coherent note-to-note melodies. Motivated so predominantly toward the rapid course, frustrated in my attempts to reproduce recorded passages, I had left dormant whatever skills for melodic construction I may have had. The simplest sorts of melody-making entailed a note-to-note intentionality that had been extraordinarily deemphasized by virtue of the isolated ways in which Id been learning.

Its precisley in this emerging capacity to form fully articulated phrases that the performer achieves a degree of competence. Though not yet a native speaker of

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the language, there is nonetheless a fledgling facility for forming coherent sentences. Dreyfus chracterization of the Proficient stage is particularly interesting in terms of the Heideggerean opposition between the present-at-hand and the ready-to-hand:
Suppose that events are experienced with involvement as the learner practices his skill, and that, as the result of both positive and negative experiences, responses are either strengthened or inhibited. Should this happen, the performers theory of the skill, as represented by rules and principles will gradually be replaced by situational discriminations accompanied by associated responses. Proficiency seems to develop if, and only if, experience is assimilated in this atheoretical way and intuitive behavior replaces reasoned responses. (Dreyfus 1996:20)

These situational discriminations of intuitive behavior point explicitly to the mode of absorbed coping that is definitive of the ready-to-hand. And its precisely in the ready-to-hand that experience is assimilated; i.e., it is embodied by the experiencing subject. With an increase in embodied skill, then, there is also an increase in the ratio of ready-to-hand to present-at-hand modes of engagement:
As the brain of the performer acquires the ability to discriminate between a variety of situations entered into with concern and involvement, plans are intuitively evoked and certain aspects stand out as important without the learner standing back and choosing those plans or deciding to adopt that perspective. Action becomes easier and less stressful as the learner simply sees what needs to be achieved rather than deciding, by a calculative procedure, which of several

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possible alternatives should be selected. There is less doubt that what one is trying to accomplish is appropriate when the goal is simply obvious rather than the winner of a complex competition. In fact, at the moment of involved intuitive response there can be no doubt, since doubt comes only with detached evaluation of performance. (Dreyfus 1996:21)

The Proficient stage is, however, still comprised of a generous quota of moments characterized by a mode of detached evaluation; i.e., the present-athand. And its interesting to note the way in which this can directly conflict with intuitive behavior:
No sooner did I try to latch onto a piece of good-sounding jazz that would seem just to come out in the midst of my improvisations, than it would be undermined, as, when one first gets the knack of a complex skill like riding a bicycle or skiing, the very first attempt to sustain an easeful management undercuts it. You struggle to stay balanced, keep failing, then several revolutions of the pedals occur, the bicycle seems to go off on its own, you try to keep it up, and it disintegrates. Yet theres no question but that the hang of it was glimpsed, the bicycle seemed to do the riding by itself, and essence of the experience was tasted with a this is it feeling, like a revelation. (Sudnow 2001:76)

What we see is the paradigmatic Heideggerean breakdown; the catalyst that effects the shift from a ready-to-hand to a present-at-hand mode of perceiving the task environment. The occurrence of such breakdowns is directly related to the number and type of skills the performer has managed to assimilate in the course of interactions with the environment up to the moment in question. Or, more specifically, the occurrence of breakdowns is directly related to the number and type of skills the performer has not managed to assimilate:
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The proficient performer simply has not yet had enough experience with the wide variety of possible responses to each of the situations he or she can now discriminate to have rendered the best response automatic. For this reason, the proficient performer, seeing the goal and the important features of the situation, must still decide what to do. To decide, he falls back on detached, rule-based determination of actions. (Dreyfus 1996:22)

What distinguishes the Proficient stage from the Competent stage is a shift to a yet higher level of articulational scale. That is, from the level of the individual phrase or sentence to the level of, perhaps, a discussion or argument. What distinguishes the Proficient stage from the Expertise stage, however, is the continuity of the discourse. A continuity thatin the case of proficiencyis rendered discontinuous by the intrusion of breakdowns. Sudnow also uses a linguistic analogy:
From a virtual hodgepodge of phonemes and approximate paralinguistics, a sentence structure was slowly taking form, sayings now being attempted, themes starting to achieve some cogent management. But at the same time, courses of action were being sustained that faded and disintegrated into stammerings and stutterings, connectives yet to become integrally part of the process. (Sudnow 2001:56)

Its these connectivesa way of making the best of things continuously (Sudnow 2001:59)that gradually fall into place over the course of sustained practice. With this falling into place, and with the embodiment of ever more refined responses to the dynamical contingencies of the environment, the occurrence of breakdownsi.e. the solicitation of self-conscious thought, and the catalyst of stammerings and stutteringsbecomes increasingly seldom.
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Ive already suggested that a capacity for continuous intuitive interactional response to environmental dynamics is definitive of what Dreyfus describes as the Expertise stage. But Dreyfus also points to a greater refinement to these responses than there is to the variety of responses that are typical during the Proficient stage:
The expert not only knows what needs to be achieved, based on mature and practiced situational discrimination, but also knows how to achieve the goal. A more subtle and refined discrimination ability is what distinguishes the expert from the proficient performer, with further discrimination among situations all seen as similar with respect to plan or perspective distinguishing those situations requiring one action from those demanding another. (Dreyfus 1996:25)

More specifically, he suggests that discriminating ability and a continuity of response are necessarily linked criteria of expertise:
With enough experience with a variety of situations, all seen from the same perspective but requiring different tactical decisions, the proficient performer gradually decomposes this class of situations into subclasses, each of which share the same decision, single action, or tactic. This allows the immediate intuitive response to each situation which is characteristic of expertise. (Dreyfus 1996:25)

The lessons learned from breakdowns during the Proficient stage, then, have enabled the expert performer to respond to the same conditions from which those breakdowns emerged in a timely and unselfconscious manner. Actions are perceptually guided, the perfomer is immersed in the activity, and the I think is supplanted by an I can:

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Id see a stretch of melody suddenly appear, unlike others Id seen, seemingly because of something I was doing, though my fingers went to places to which I didnt feel Id specifically taken them. Certain right notes played in certain right ways appeared just to get done, in a little strip of play thatd go by before I got a good look at it. (Sudnow 2001:76)

With the refinement of dispositional abilities, there also emerges a parallel refinement of articulational fluency:
I could hear it. I could hear a bit of that language being well spoken, could recognize that Id done a saying in that language, in fact for the very first time, a saying particularly said in all of its detail: its pitches, intensities, pacings, durations, accentingsa saying said just so. (Sudnow 2001:78)

At this point in the discontinuous unfolding of skill acquisition, the performer embodies perceptual, actional and cognitive capacities that, in suitable performance circumstances, enable the experience of flow. In light of the apparent discontinuities of skill acquisition, it may be worth revising the diagram of figure 3.8, in which cognitive unfolding is indicated as continuous over time. In figure 3.9, the temporal dimension is segmented into discrete blocks corresponding to Dreyfus five stages of skill acquisition.

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1.

Novice

2.

Advanced beginner

3.

Competence

4.

Proficient

5.

Expertise

SKILL

Time

HUMAN BODY

INSTRUMENT

Figure 3.9. A detailed view of enactive performance practice, encompassing the discontinuous unfolding of skill acquisition. Skill is indicative of cognitive, motor and perceptual skills. It is also indicative of the developing capacity for coordination between all three. I represents the map from human intentionality to the instrument, while R represents the map from the instruments reactions back to the human.

Skill replaces Cognition in this diagram, where skill can be said to encompass cognitive, motor and perceptual skills, as well as the capacity for coordination among the three components in both reflective and unreflective behavior. A more accurate model yet might indicate the changing nature of human body/instrument relations over each of the five stages of skill acquisition, but as it stands, the diagram of the continuous and circular human/instrument interaction loop is sufficiently general to be applicable at each of the stages.
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Sudnows account in Ways of the Hand is representative of what I have termed an enactive performance practice. But there is nothing particularly extraordinary about the way in which his skills were acquired. Given an able body (and therefore an innate capacity for perception, action and cognition), an intentionality (e.g. to become an improvising jazz pianist, to produce coherent sequences of notes, etc.), and a sufficiently responsive instrument (e.g. a piano), any human subject might follow an analagous course. In Sudnows case, these three prerequisites to enactive performance practice came for free. But my argument has been that in the case of performance with digital musical instruments, something fundamental is missing; i.e. a sufficiently responsive instrument. A sufficient responsiveness is synonymous with what I have referred to as resistance. And its precisely the kind of resistance that an instrument affords to the intentioned, embodied agent that will determine whether or not that instrument has the kind of immanent potential that would lead to an enactive performance practice. Kinds of instrumental resistance, then, will be a major focus when the discussion turns to issues of implementation in Chapter 4.

3.6

Conclusion

I began this chapter with a discussion of the inevitable paradox in any description of direct experience. The model of enactive performance practicean attempt at such a descriptionbrings the discussion squarely back to this fundamental, instinctive, and largely unreflective way in which humans, through the agency of

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their bodies, relate to the world. This raises the question: if unreflective behavior is so fundamental to human experience, why go to the trouble of detailing so many of its particularities? Why not let that which will happen as a matter of course, happen as a matter of course? Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty viewed their work as opposed to the mechanistic underpinnings of canonical Western philosophy. In their respective analyses of mundane, everyday, unreflective activity, there is an agenda to replace the Cartesian model of subjectivity with that of the embodied agent at large in the world. I suggested, earlier in the chapter, that a reversal of the Cartesian axiom constitutes the first concern of the phenomenological project. The mechanistic and the phenomenological discourses, then, are fundamentally at odds. And to the extent that technical discourse continues to hinge on the discourse of mechanistic philosophy, it also continues to be resistant to phenomenology. My concern, then, has been with outlining a model of human experience and activity that serves as an alternative to the model routinely adopted by technical designers, i.e. that of the perpetually disembodied Cartesian subject. If it is in fact possible to design and build digital musical instruments that allow for enactive processes to be realized, then we will have done nothing other than arrive right back at the most fundamental form of human agency.

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Implementation

4.1

Kinds of Resistance

There are two key assumptions that underlie the enactive model of interaction: 1. that human activity and behavior has rich, structured dynamics, and 2. that the kinds of resistance that objects offer to humans in the course of activity are key to the on-going dynamical structuring of interactional patterns. In the previous chapter, I was concerned with describing the interactional patterns of an enactive performance practice with a view to the implications of those patterns for cognition. Focus was directed at the dynamics of human activity and behavior. In this chapter, focus is directed at the kinds of resistance that a candidate digital musical instrument might offer to a human performer in the midst of performative activity. The underlying concern, then, shifts from theory to implementation. I have suggested previously in the essay that conventional acoustic instruments, because of the resistance they offer to the performer, serve as useful examples of technical objects that embody the potential for enaction. But in the huge diversity of mechanisms that we see across the range of acoustic
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instruments, there is a proportionate diversity in kinds of resistance. The physical feedback to the performer that arises in the encounter between bow and string, for example, is of a different kind to that which comes of the projection of breath into a length of tubing. We can assume, then, that in much the same way that the contingencies of human embodiment play a determining role in the dynamical emergence of performative patterns, so too do the contingencies of instrumental embodiment. This makes the task of arriving at a universal template for the design of enactive musical instruments a profoundly complex, if not obviously impractical undertaking. In the various models of interaction that I schematized in the previous chapter, the maps from human motor function to computer input devices, and from computer output devices to human sensory input, are non-specific in terms of the particular sensorimotor mechanisms that are activated in the course of interactionthe models are intended to be as general and universal as possible. But as soon as we move from interaction diagrams to real world implementations, a higher degree of specificity is required. If, for example, a candidate model for an enactive digital musical instrument were to remain general, there would need to be an account of the myriad ways in which human energy might be transduced as signals at the computer inputs. In the context of the present study, rather than attempting to compile a comprehensive catalogue of implementational possibilities, I will focus on one particular real world implementation: a digital musical instrument that also happens to represent my first serious attempt at engaging the essays key theoretical issues in the form of an actual device. This device, as with any musical instrument, offers unique kinds
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of resistance to the performer. The final component of the study sets out, then, to detail the instruments implementational specifics, with a view to the various ways in which its indigenous and particular kinds of resistance may or may not lend themselves to the development of an enactive performance practice. Standard human-computer interaction models partition the computer into three distinct layers: input devices, programs and output devices. This is the model I employed in the interaction diagrams of Chapter 3, and I will stick with that model here. It would seem likely, when the core concern is how the candidate instrument is resistant to the human performer, that the greater portion of attention would be directed towards input and output devices, i.e., hardware. It is at the level of hardware, after all, that the performer actually physically engages the instrument. But as I pointed out in Chapter 1, digital instruments constitute a special class of musical devices: their sonic behavior is not immanent in their material embodiment, but rather, must be programmed. So, while hardware certainly constitutes more than a passing concern, the dynamical behavior and resistance of the instrument is to a large degree encapsulated in its programs. In the pages that follow, I will, therefore, direct a significant amount of attention to issues of software. In persisting with the standard division between hardware and software, I hope also to demonstrate the utility of keeping the two layers separate in the design process. While I shall be discussing just one specific implementation, I nonetheless hope to make it apparent that in maintaining a loose coupling between hardware and software components, the potential for reusing those components is increased. This is particularly true of software components, which
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may at any time in the future need to be integrated into different implementational contexts, such as a new hardware framework.1 In that case, any one particular software framework brings with it a certain modest degree of generality. And to the extent that the framework continues to evolve across distinct implementations, we may also see the beginnings ofif not a universal approach to the design of enactive digital instrumentsone that is at least suitably general and robust.

4.2

Mr. Feely: Hardware

Overview
A device that goes under the name of Mr. Feely represents my first attempt at the implementation of an enactive digital musical instrument (figure 4.1).

For an interesting counter example to this approach, where hardware and software

may in a certain variety of cases be inextricable, see Cook (2004).

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Figure 4.1. Mr. Feely.

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Mr. Feelys computational nucleus resides on a miniature x86 compatible motherboard, running the Linux 2.6 kernel, with patches applied for low latency audio throughput and for granting scheduling priority to real-time audio threads. Eight channel audio A/D and D/A hardware, MIDI A/D and D/A boards, and power conversion modules are located in the same enclosure as the motherboard. One of the design goals was to create a silent instrument with no moving parts inside the enclosure. For that reason, the operating system resides on flash memory, and a specific motherboard/chipset combination was chosen because of its capacity for fanless operation.

Integration and Instrumentality

Sukandar Kartadinata has used the term integrated electronic instruments to denote a class of devices characterized by an encompassing approach to their material realization (Kartadinata 2003). Encompassing is used here in its most literal sense: all of the components of which the instrument is comprisedthe input devices, the output devices, and the internal circuitryare encompassed within a single physical entity. Kartadinata notes that total integration is not ubiquitous among conventional acoustic instrumentse.g., the bow is a distinct physical entity from the body of the violinbut total integration is not really the point of an integrated approach. Rather, emphasis is placed on the coherence of the instrument; that is, how the material embodiment affords a performative encounter with a unity. This is in sharp contrast to the sprawl of individual devices and cables that characterizes the often lab-like stage setups built around general purpose computers (Kartadinata 2003:180).
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Integration and coherence of the instrumental embodiment were important factors in the design of Mr. Feely. From the outset, I had in mind that it was of critical importance that the instrument should have an instrumentality. This is suggestive of two different interpretations, both of which figured in my approach to design, and both of which factor in the perceived coherence of the instrument to the performer: 1. that the instrument in its material embodiment should be indicative of a specific purpose, and 2. that the instrument should have the feel of a musical instrument. It may appear redundant to suggest that an instrument should be instrumental, but it seemed to me a useful way of distinguishing the project from those in which the instrument comprises a general purpose, off-theshelf computer (with or without an attendant array of peripheral input devices). Figure 4.2 shows Mr. Feely in the playing position. Because of the instruments weight, it is secured on a stand, but designed to rest in the lap of the performer.

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Figure 4.2. Mr. Feely in the playing position.

The playing position ensures that there is constant physical contact between performer and instrument. This aspect of the design is tied inin the most literal sensewith the aim that the instrument should feel like a musical instrument. In the act of playing, the contact with the instrumental body is intensified by hand actions at the control surface, as weight is transferred from the upper body to the thighs. The sense of the instruments physically being there is, then, proportional to the amplitude of the humans motor energy output. But there is another aspect to this being there, and this is tied in with the way in which the instrument is indicative of its use. The control surface is situated at the performers centre of gravity, and it is angled (with respect to the performer) in

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such a way that it presents itself optimally to the hands, and occupies the focal ground in the field of vision. Its not just that the instrument is there, butto paraphrase Michael Hammanthat it is so very there that the opportunity for action, for physically engaging the controls, makes itself more than readily apparent.

Control Surface
Unlike the computer-as-it-comesa general purpose deviceMr. Feely is a special purpose device. This means that the instrument is intended to be nothing but a musical instrument, and that it therefore need not accommodate the multiple representational paradigms required of a multiplicity of possible usages. An important aspect, then, of the instruments instrumentality, is that the interface is devoid of representational abstractions. In keeping with Rodney Brooks dictum that the world is its own best model (Brooks 1991), I avoided any graphical representations of the sound or its generating mechanisms at the interface, giving preference to the performers perceptions of the sound itself, and the cross-coupling of these perceptions with the tactile and visual engagement of the instrument and its input devices. The way in which Mr. Feelys interface is different to that of the computer-as-it-comes, then, is equivalent to the considerable difference between using the real world as a metaphor for interaction and using it as a medium for interaction (Dourish 2001:101). Three classes of input device are used on Mr. Feelys control surface: knobs, buttons and joysticks. The control surface is partitioned into distinct regions (figure 4.3), which are distinguished by the points in the audio synthesis system
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to which they are linked. I will detail the specific functional behaviors and mapping strategies used to connect the input devices to the audio system in 4.3. It is, however, worth noting the control surfaces basic partitioning scheme in this section. Although this unavoidably touches on software issues, the functional layout of the panel is a hardware concern.

Display & Patch Control Joysticks

Variants Mute Buttons Global Power Volume On/Off

Channel Section

Global Section

Figure 4.3. Mr. Feely: Control surface partitioning scheme.

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Of the eight distinct regions that comprise the control surface, four would ordinarily be utilized only between periods of performative activity: those labelled Display & Patch Control, Mute Buttons, Global Volume, and Power On/Off in figure 4.3. The Display and Patch Control section is described under Visual Display below; the functions of the other three sections are self-explanatory. The four remaining control surface regionslabelled Channel Section, Global Section, Joysticks, and Variants in figure 4.3indicate the areas in which activity is focused during performance. The Channel Section is partitioned into five discrete channels of three knobs and one button each; there are respectively mapped to five discrete audio synthesis networks in the software system. The Global Section is divided into two subsections, which respectively comprise nine knobs, and three knobs combined with three buttons. These controllers are mapped to a global audio processing network, and in certain cases to points in the five discrete channels. Signals from each of the five discrete synthesis channels are passed as inputs to this processing network. The Joystick Section is comprised of two x-y joysticks, one of which springs back to its centre position when not in use. These joysticks are considered freely assignable to any and multiple input points in the discrete synthesis channels or the global processing network. The Variants Section is comprised of six backlit buttons. When one of these buttons is toggled on, all other buttons will be in their off state. These buttons are used to switch between pre-stored variants in the synthesis network. These variants may differ by synthesis parameter settings, by mapping functions, or by synthesis network topologies.
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With all these individual input devices and multiple mapping systems, it would seem that the performer has rather a lot to remember during performance. And if the performer is required to store such data in conscious memory, then the instrument is not, in itself, properly or sufficiently indicative of its use. This is not, however, how things work in practice. Firstly, by partitioning the control surface into functional regions, the user quickly adapts to the relationship between a cluster of controls and clusterings of associated behavioral patterns at the instruments output. The physical layout of the control surface, then, reinforces the relationship between specific functional regions and specific functional behaviors to both the visual and tactile senses. Secondly, by employing a static functional structure across different patchesthat is, across varying implementations of the underlying audio synthesis networksthe patterning of the instruments behavior remains relatively constant. This means that motor patterns do not need to be relearned from scratch from one patch to the next; in fact they should be optimally adaptable, from a base set of functional correspondences, across even radically divergent implementations of the sound generating subsystem. The performer, then, is not required to store a catalogue of controller functions and mappings in conscious memory, but rather learns through performing. The layout of the control panel is designed to facilitate this learning process. The emphasis is placed on motor memory as opposed to the conscious storing of data, and the underlying software system is designed in such a way that motor memory should be transferable and adaptable across varying audio subsystem implementations. The control surface is still, as a whole, sufficiently
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complex and multifaceted as to offer resistance to learning. It was my aim that the degree of resistance should be neither so minimal that the interface would become quickly transparent to motor memory and activity, or so great that, even after a significant amount of practice, it would remain beyond grasp.

Visual Display
In chapter 2, I discussed the cost to the nonvisual senses of the visuocentric approach to interaction as typified by the computer-as-it-comes. This is something that I tried to avoid in the design of Mr. Feely, not only with a view to minimizing the cognitive demands of visual attention, but with a view to rendering the interface as free of abstraction as possible. It proved useful, however, to integrate a character display with the control surface, which is used to navigate a patch bank between performances, and to monitor data in the case of breakdowns (e.g. program exceptions, memory errors, CPU overload, etc.). The display is not intended to be used during performance, except as a notification mechanism in the case of such a breakdown. It does not, therefore, make any demands on the performers attention, and to the extent that vision is required for the performance task, it may be directed to the guidance of motor activities.

Audio Display
An important aspect of the feel of many conventional acoustic instruments is the haptic feedback to the performer from the instruments vibrating body as it radiates sonic energy. Unlike conventional acoustic instruments, electronic
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instruments require the use of amplifiers and loudspeakers in order to propagate sound in space. Except in the case that the amplifier/loudspeaker system is built into the instrumental body, electronic instruments are lacking in the haptic vibrational feedback that is characteristic of their acoustic counterparts. This issue was taken into consideration in the design of Mr. Feely, but unfortunately, in deciding upon an amplifier/loudspeaker system, it was outweighed by other constraints: 1. that the amplifier be powerful enough for the instrument to be used without further amplification (e.g. through a P.A. system), and 2. that the loudspeaker should have a wide radiation pattern. This limited the options among available technologies, and resulted in the choice of a combined amplifier/loudspeaker system that, because of its size and weight, could not practically be integrated with the body of the instrument. Nonetheless, by careful positioning of the amplifier/loudspeaker in performance, its possible to go a certain way towards the feel of a conventional instrument. By placing the amplifier/loudspeaker on the floor, as close as is practical to the body of the instrument, the radiation of vibrational energy can be felt through the feet and, to a lesser extent, the torso. The effect varies with the character of the sound, its frequency and loudness, the type of floor surface, and the type and number of reflective and absorbtive material in proximity to the loudspeaker. This speaker placement has one other advantage: the location of the point source of the soundwhich, in the case of the great majority of acoustic instruments, is the instruments bodyis as close as is practical to the body of the instrument. The perceptual localisation of the origin of the sound is an important indicator of the

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instruments phenomenal presence, both for the performer, fellow performers, and the audience.

Summary
It would be premature to evaluate the ways in which Mr. Feely offers resistance to the performer without having paid due attention to software. Nonetheless, it may be useful to recap on the key aspects of the hardware implementation, and to point to some implications for embodiment, and for the emergence of an enactive performance practice. Firstly, the instrument is integrated and instrumental. This means that the performer engages an instrument that has a functional coherence to its material embodiment as well as a tangible physical presence in performance. These factors contribute to the potential for an encounter with the instrument that is engaging (one of the five criteria of embodied activity from Chapter 1). Secondly, the instrumental interface affords distributed motor activities without the burden of representational abstractions. The interface is, then, motocentric rather than visuocentric, and encompasses multiple distributed points of interaction. This stands in contrast to the visuocentric, representation-hungry, singular (as opposed to distributed), and sequential (as opposed to parallel) mode of interaction that is idiosyncratic to the computer-as-it-comes. At the same time, then, that the hardware interface to Mr. Feely avoids the interface model of the computer-as-it-comes, it also avoids the associated costs of that model for interaction. Whereas the computer-as-it-comes would situate the users attention in a world of metaphorical abstraction and would provide no guarantee of
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meeting timing constraints (see 2.4), Mr. Feely situates the users attention directly within the activity, encourages the parallel distribution of the activity across distinct sensorimotor modalities (touch and proprioception, hearing, vision), andbecause of the distributed and multiply parallel nature of the performative modeoffers a reasonable chance that the real-time constraints of musical performance might be met. These factors again correspond to certain of the five criteria of embodiment; specifically, that embodied activity be situated, multimodal, and timely. When the focus is shifted from the instantaneous aspects of embodied activity to embodiment as an emergent phenomenon, we touch on issues of adaptation and cognition. Such issues are tied in with the instruments behavior; i.e., with the resistance that it offers to the performer, and the unique dynamical patterning of thought and activity that comes of that resistance. As a piece of hardware, Mr. Feely affords embodied modes of interaction. But to get from interaction to realizationi.e., to the emergence of an enactive performance practicethe instrument will be required to offer resistance to the performer through the medium of sound. This brings the discussion around to the implementation of the instruments sonic behavior in software.

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4.3

Mr. Feely: Software

Overview
Mr. Feelys software system is written in the SuperCollider programming language.2 The language was chosen for three main reasons: 1. it is mature and offers a rich set of built-in features, 2. it is easily extensible with user-defined modules, primitives, and plug-ins, and 3. it is object-oriented. As the main focus of my work has been directed at the creation of a system that would allow for dynamical behaviors, much of the task of programming has involved the incremental development of a frameworkan integrated library of extensions to the languagethat augments the base audio synthesis architecture with modules that allow for complex dynamical mappings between system entities. The implementational possibilities of these extensions to the language will comprise the main focus of this and the next section. First, however, it will be useful to describe the base architecture on which the framework is built.

SuperCollider Server Architecture

The SuperCollider audio synthesis engine passes signals between nodes on a server, where those nodes represent instances of user-defined synthesis and processing functions. A sample signal flow diagram would look familiar to anybody who has worked with modular synthesis systems (figure 4.4).

http://www.audiosynth.com.

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NODES

SIGNALS

SOUND

Figure 4.4. SuperCollider synthesis server: Signal flow.

A node on the synthesis server may contain parameter slots. For example, a node that represents an oscillator function may contain slots for frequency, phase and amplitude parameters. The values of a parameter slot may be set by sending messages to the node to which the slot belongs, or by mapping the parameter slot to the output of a bus (figure 4.5).

SLOTS MESSAGE BUS

Figure 4.5. Writing values to a nodes parameter slots by 1. sending a message, and 2. mapping the slot to the output of a bus. 117

A bus is a virtual placeholder for a signal. Its possible, for example, to tap an output signal from any node in the synthesis network and route it to a bus, from which the signal could be rerouted as an audio signal input to any other node, or mapped to a parameter slot belonging to any other node (figure 4.6).

BUS 1

BUS 2

Figure 4.6. Signal routing between parallel synthesis networks using busses. Bus 1 taps an output signal from a node in the first channel and routes it to the audio input of a node in the second channel. Bus 2 taps an output signal from a node in the second channel and maps it to a parameter slot of a node in the first channel.

SuperColliders bussing architecture allows for the flexible routing of signals within the synthesis network. This flexibility is exploited and extended in the
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extensions to the language that form the basis of Mr. Feelys mapping framework.

Mapping Framework
The mapping framework that I have developed for Mr. Feely is primarily concerned with providing a flexible and intuitive mechanism for routing signals between components of the audio synthesis network, and for defining functional mappings between them. A functional mapping can be taken to mean the transfer function from the output of one component to the input of another. That is, a function that is applied to the signal such that the signals characteristics are transformed between output at the source component and input at the receiver component. The mapping framework consists of a hierarchical library of such functions encapsulated within discrete software objects. The behavior of the instrument as a whole is in large part determined by these functions and their various mappings and routings within the audio synthesis network. As I noted in the previous section, any signal within the audio synthesis network may be routed to a bus, and rerouted from that bus to any other point in the network. In Mr. Feelys mapping framework, the functional transformation of the signal takes place between the bus and the signals destination. The objects that perform these transformations comprise the mapping layer. The mapping layer allows for the flexibility to route the signal at a single bus to multiple destinations with multiple functional mappings (figure 4.7). This is an example of a one-to-many (Wanderley 2001) mapping model.

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Mapping Layer

x BUS y z

Figure 4.7 The signal at a bus is split into three signals. These signals are routed to three different parameter slots, effecting a one-to-many mapping. Each signal is subject to a functional transformation (those transformations denoted here as x, y and z) between the bus and their respective parameter slot destinations. The software objects that perform these transformations comprise the mapping layer.

The mapping framework also allows for the cross-coupling (Hunt, Wanderley, and Paradis 2003) of bus signals, or many-to-one (Wanderley 2001) mappings (figure 4.8).

BUS 1

BUS 2

Figure 4.8. The signals at two busses are subject to functional transformations (x and y). The transformed signals are summed, or

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cross-coupled, resulting in a mapping from multiple signal sources to a single parameter slot.

Additionally, the mapping framework allows for what I have termed functionparameter mappings, where the output of one functional mapping may be mapped into a parameter slot in another (figure 4.9).

BUS 1

BUS 2

Figure 4.9. The signals at two busses are subject to functional transformations (x and y). The output of function x is mapped into a parameter slot in function y. The output of function y is mapped to a parameter slot in an audio synthesis network component.

For example, function x in figure 4.9 might scale the output of the signal at BUS 1 into the range [1,10]. Function y might multiply the output value of the signal at BUS 2 by the value of an argument, where that argument is set at a parameter slot. When the output of x is mapped into the parameter slot that corresponds to the multiplicand argument of y, the signal at BUS 2 is multiplied by the scaled signal at BUS 1. The output of the dependent function y is then mapped to a parameter slot in an audio synthesis network component. This is a

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simple example, but it makes clear the kinds of complex interdependencies between system components that function-parameter mappings allow. Mr. Feelys hardware controls are connected to the audio synthesis network through busses (figure 4.10).

x
ADC

BUS

y z

Figure 4.10. The map from hardware to software. Analog signals are read by an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and written to a bus in the audio synthesis network. The signal at the bus may be treated as though it were any other signal.

While all busses in the audio synthesis system are instances of a single class of bus, and therefore have identical implementations, they are nonetheless classified as having either local or global scope. All busses that are placeholders for signals routed from audio signals have global scope, and can be routed to any point in the synthesis network. Busses that are placeholders for signal arriving from Mr. Feelys hardware controls, however, are accorded either local or global scope, depending on the particular input device to which they are connected. In this scheme, the scope of a bus corresponds to the function of the input device as defined by the partitioning of Mr. Feelys control surface into functional regions.

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Channel Section controllers, for example, are connected to busses that have local scope within each of the five discrete audio synthesis network channels, while Global Section controllers are connected to busses that have global scope (figure 4.11).

1
L1.1 L1.2 L1.3

2
L2.1 L2.2 L2.3

GLOBAL
G1 G2

Figure 4.11. Local and global scope of busses. Busses L1.1-3 and L2.1-3 are connected to Channel Section controllers on Mr. Feelys control panel. Their scope is local; i.e., they may only be routed to the corresponding audio synthesis network channels, 1 and 2. The output of these audio synthesis channels is summed and sent to a global processing network. 123

Global busses G1 and G2 are connected to Global Section controllers on Mr. Feelys control panel. The scope of these busses is global; i.e., they may be routed to the global processing network, or to any of the discrete audio synthesis channels.

Busses have a special status in the mapping framework. They are placeholders for signals that originate both outside and inside the audio synthesis network, and therefore represent the points at which human action and internal mechanism coincide. It was a deliberate design choice to accord busses this dual role, as a transparency to the source of signals within the system effectively blurs the implementational boundary between human and instrumental behaviors. That is to say, signals are treated as equivalent whether their origins are external or internal to the system, and this equivalency of signals implies that all signal flow networks are formed at the same level of structure. The push-and-pull of dynamical forces that is key to the instruments resistance, then, is encapsulated in the structure and behavior of a single integrated signal flow network. To this point, the simple mapping schemes I have illustrated have not demonstrated models of dynamical behavior. The only difference, for example, between the mapping scheme of figure 4.11 and that of a linear summing mixer is that the bussing architecture in the figure shows the possibility of a flexible routing of controls signals to individual parameter slots in the various mixer channels. The dynamical behavior of the system as a whole would, nonetheless, appear to be relatively flat. Consider a system, however, where the outputs from

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two discrete audio synthesis networks are routed to global busses, and then back to parameter slots within the discrete networks (figure 4.12).

GLOBAL

A1

A2

Figure 4.12. Discrete audio synthesis networks are coupled to form an interacting composite network. Global busses A1 and A2 serve as placeholders for the output signals of channels 1 and 2 . These signals are transformed by functions, x and y, and the continuous outputs of those functions are routed to parameter slots in the discrete channels. The output of channel 1, after underdoing functional transformation, is used to regulate the internal behavior of channel 2, and vice versa.

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In this example, the output of channel 1 is routed back to a parameter slot in channel 2, and vice versa. The output signals from the two channels, then, rather than being summed (as in figure 4.11), could be used to regulate one anothers behavior. The structure of the networki.e., its topologycreates a coupling between the two discrete audio synthesis networks; where they had previously formed uncoupled autonomous systems, they now form coupled nonautonomous systems. The way in which the bussed signals act as regulatory mechanisms in the respective synthesis networks is defined by the mapping functions, indicated in figure 4.12 as x and y. These functions might encapsulate any number of behaviors. They might, for example, map the audio signal unaltered into the parameter slot, scale the audio signal to an effective range, track the signals frequency or amplitude characteristics, scale it to an effective range and map the resulting signal to the slot, and so on. Any of these choices would create the possibility for complex behavioral dependencies between the two synthesis networks, and at the same time, the possibility for nonlinear dynamical behaviors in the composite (coupled) system.

Summary
From the perspective of either of the discrete networks in figure 4.12, internal behavior is nonautonomous; i.e., behavioral patterns are determined in part by signals that originate outside the network. From the perspective of a human observer, however, the composite network (comprised of the two interacting subnetworks) could be said to be autonomous, as it operates, and exhibits behavior, without human intervention. This presents an interesting design
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problem: we want the instrument to have rich, structured dynamics, but at the same time, we want those dynamics to emerge in the coupling of the instrument to a human performer. So, although we could engineer a system that exhibits dynamical behavior without human involvement, the kind of system that is more compelling with a view to enactive performance practice would be one that, rather than exhibiting autonomous dynamical behavior, embodies the potential for dynamical behavior when coupled to a human performer. This does not rule out the kind of model encapsulated in figure 4.12. In fact, this model forms the basis of the first usage example I will outline in the next section. It does, however, call for calibration of the systema tuning of the systems dynamical responsivenesswhen human action enters the equation. In summary, then, the mapping framework allows for the creation of complex interdependencies between system components. And these interdependencies are key to the push-and-pull dynamics that define the instruments kinds of resistance. But the question remains as to how one might go about calibrating the system in such a way that it requires human action; i.e., such that when there is a push-and-pull of physical forces at the hardware layer, the instrument responds and resists with proportionately rich and varied sonic behavior. Ill take up this issue by outlining two specific usage examples.

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4.4

Mr. Feely: Usage Examples

Overview
In this section I outline two examples of Mr. Feely in use. At the present writing, the first model is in an early stage of development, while the second is relatively mature. I have chosen these specific examples because of their differences. Or, more specifically, because their differences illustrate the ways in which diverse implementations might highlight distinct facets of a single basic concern: enactive performance practice. The two usage examples are interesting, then, because they point to different kinds of resistance, to different modes of embodied activity, and to different realizational potentialities.

Example 1: Pushing the envelope

Figure 4.13 illustrates an extension of the interacting composite network of figure 4.12. As in figure 4.12, the output of channel 1 is mapped via a global bus to a parameter slot in channel 2, and vice versa, in such a way that the two discrete audio synthesis networks regulate one anothers behavior in a manner determined by the output of the functions x and y. The example in figure 4.13 departs from that of figure 4.12, however, through the addition of two local busses, L1.1 and L2.1.

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GLOBAL 1
L1.1

2
L2.1

A1

A2

a x

b y

Figure 4.13. Functional covariance. Local busses L1.1 and L2.1 are placeholders for signals from Mr. Feelys Channel Section. These signals are mapped to parameter slots of mapping functions internal to the composite audio synthesis network. This is an instance of functionparameter mapping, where the output of function a serves as a continuous input, or argument, to function x, and the output of function b serves as a continuous input to function y.

The local busses L1.1 and L2.1 provide the effective point of access to the system for human action. Rather than being mapped to parameter slots in the nodes that comprise the synthesis network, these busses are mapped to parameter slots of mapping functions that are internal to the system; i.e., they
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represent function-parameter mappings. The way in which the output signals of the coupled channels regulate one anothers behavior, then, is largely determined by the functional mapping from the local busses to the parameter nodes of the global busses, and is covariant with human action. This network of mappings forms the basis of a performance scenario Ive developed for Mr. Feely that goes under the working title pushing the envelope. The mappings illustrated in figure 4.13 represent just a partial view of the entire system, which utilizes five discrete audio synthesis networks and assigns three local busses to each network, corresponding to the five channels of three knobs that comprise Mr. Feelys Channel Section. The two busses per channel that are not shown in figure 4.13 are mapped to various parameter nodes in the respective discrete audio synthesis networks. These mappings vary across different implementations of the basic system, but in all instances map into continuous ranges as suitable to the synthesis parameter in question. The functional mappings from the local busses L1.1 and L2.1the busses that are shown in figure 4.13are key to the dynamical responsiveness of this particular network. Its their role that I will focus on here. In the pushing the envelope model, the functions x and y (figure 4.13) represent composite functions: amplitude followers (on the signals at A2 and A1 respectively) modulated by the output of a logistic mapping function:

xn+1 = xn(1 - xn)

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The outputs of x and y are connected as level controls at the output stage of channels 1 and 2 respectively, effecting a coupling between the two channels. The logistic mapping function is interesting because the trajectory of its orbit varies with different values of the variable . It represents a simple nonlinear system, the response of which becomes increasingly chaotic when the value of is greater than 3, and is entirely unstable when is greater than 3.87 (assuming values of x in the range [-1, 1]). The mapping functions x and y, then, already embody the potential for complex dynamical behavior, where the dynamical contour of the modulated signals derived from A2 and A1 may be more or less chaotic or flat depending on the assignment of a constant value to . The functions a and b in figure 4.13 represent the slope (rate of change) of the signals at busses L1.1 and L1.2 respectively. The amplitude of this functions output will vary proportionately with the rate of performer activity at the hardware controlsi.e. the corresponding knobs in Mr. Feelys Channel Section that are connected to the bus. This means, essentially, that the more active the activity, the greater the amplitude of the resulting signal. The parameter slots in the mapping functions x and y (figure 4.13) represent the variable in the logistic mapping function. This creates for a potentially very interesting mapping. As the outputs of a and b are effectively plugged into , the dynamical contour of the outputs of x and y are directly proportional to the rate of performer activity. The effective ranges of a and b are scaled to a dynamically rich range in (between 2.9 and 3.87; a range that encompasses the discontinuous transition from flat to chaotic dynamics through successive period doublings), which results in the system as a whole having response
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characteristics that vary dynamically with the push-and-pull of human motor actions. For example, an increase in the rate of left-right knob twiddling with respect to time (figure 4.14) will result in a proportionate increase in the degree of chaos in the outputs of functions x and y.

TIME

Figure 4.14. Left-right knob manipulation with respect to time.

In practice, the pushing the envelope model has certain interesting implications for performance. Firstly, because of the way the system is calibratedspecifically the tuning of the logistic map variable in relation to the rate of change of motor activityit requires a performer; i.e., without performer action, the response of the system is dynamically flat. Secondly, the system requires considerable physical effort on the part of the performer to elicit dynamically rich responses from the software system. To that extent, the system doesnt just require the performer, it requires a considerable investment of performative energy. Thirdly, the behavior of the system as a whole is far from
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transparent at first use, and in fact demands significant experimentation before certain consistent patterns and responses begin to reveal themselves. The complexity of the systems dynamical responsiveness is effectively guaranteed by the interdependencies of the five discrete audio synthesis networks, as encapsulated in the functional mappings from outputs in one channel to parameter nodes in another. The key implication of these interdependencies is that performative actions directed toward a single channel of controls will have consequences beyond the scope of the discrete audio synthesis network to which those controls are connected. That is to say, although the performer may place the focus of activity at any one moment within a specific channeland the human anatomical constraint of two-handedness tends to determine this kind of pattern in performancethe effects of that activity will nonetheless be felt throughout the composite network comprised of all five channels. In my experience thus far with this system, Ive found that its not possible to get an overall conceptual grasp on its range of behavior, and particularly on the way that dynamical changes propagate through the composite network. Nonetheless, certain recurrent patterns of motor activity have begun to emerge, and these patterns are yielding varieties of sonic responsiveness that, at the same time that they continue to be more closely aligned to certain expectations, also continue to yield new and often surprising dynamical contours.

Example 2: Surfing the fractal wave (at the end of history)

In certain respects, there are parallels in the dynamics of the pushing the envelope network to the dynamics of many conventional acoustic instruments.
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When there is no input of human energy, for example, the instruments response is flat. And when human energy is transmitted to the system, the systems dynamical responsiveness is proportionate to the amplitude of that energy. There is, then, a particular way in which the model requires the performer: it requires a pushinga directed expenditure of kinetic energyto actualize the dynamic potential that is immanent to the network. The model I outline in this sectionsurfing the fractal wave (at the end of history)3embodies an altogether different kind of resistance and affords an altogether different variety of motor activity. Where performance with conventional acoustic instruments ordinarily requires a pushing of kinetic energy into the instrumental mechanism in order to set things in motion, in the surfing the fractal wave model, things are already in motion in the instrumental mechanism. The mode of performance, then, is more concerned with giving dynamical shape and contour to these motions; an absorbed coping that is about the timely navigation of energy flows in the environment, rather than the directed transmission of energy flows that originate in the body. Hence the distinction between surfing and pushing analogies. Patterns of motor activity in surfing the fractal wave are designed around the asymmetry of handedness (Guiard 1987); i.e., dominant and non-dominant

The name is borrowed from the title of a 1997 Terence McKenna lecture

(http://www.abrupt.org/LOGOS/tm970423.html). My appropriation, however, has very little to do with McKenna's original intention.

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hands are afforded independent sub-tasks, but they cooperate in the accomplishment of the larger task that those sub-tasks comprise. Kabbash, Buxton and Sellen describe three characteristic ways in which the two hands are asymmetrically dependent in select everyday tasks:
1. The left hand sets the frame of reference for action of the right. For example, in hammering a nail, the left hand holds the nail while the right does the hammering. 2. The sequence of motion is left then right. For example, the left hand grips the paper, then the right starts to write with the pen. 3. The granularity of action of the left hand is coarser than that of the right. For example the left hand brings the painters palette in and out of range, while the right hand holds the brush and does the fine strokes onto the canvas. (Kabbash, Buxton, and Sellen 1994:418)

Each of these examples could be viewed as aspects of a single embodied tendency; a tendency that is self-reinforcing across a wide range of activities and over repeated performances. Kabbash et al. advocate the design of humancomputer interfaces that exploit the habitual ways in which humans tend to use their hands in skillful activity. The surfing the fractal wave model heads in this direction. Figure 4.15 represents a partial view of the surfing the fractal wave network model.

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LH GLOBAL
JSX a SEQ JSY b

RH

1
C1.1 C1.2 C1.3
Audio Network

2
C2.1 C2.2 C2.3
Audio Network

Figure 4.15. Surfing the fractal wave network model. The x and y outputs of a joystick with global scope (JSX, JSY) are mapped to parameter slots of a chaotic sequencer function (SEQ). The sequencer sends a stream of timed triggers to parameters in each of five discrete audio synthesis networks (for clarity, only two are shown). Local busses (C1.1-3 and C2.1-3) read signals from the knobs in Mr. Feelys Channel Section. These controls filter the results of the mapping from the sequencer stream to each of the discrete audio synthesis networks. Joystick manipulations are always performed by the left hand. Knob manipulations are in most instances performed by the right hand. Some feedback networks, mapping functions and audio synthesis network schemata have been omitted for clarity.

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The diagram divides the network space into left hand and right hand regions. In performance, the pads of the left hand fingers tend to ride the joystick, where certain gestural patterns emerge in response to the dynamical properties of the function-parameter mappings of the global busses JSX and JSY (placeholders for continuous signals from the x and y axes of the joystick, respectively) into the output of a chaotic sequencer (SEQ).4 The sequencer is calibrated in such a way that its output is more or less stable when the values of the mapping functions a and b are close to the centre of their effective ranges. In practice this means that when the joystick is in its centre position (the resting position for a spring-back style joystick), the sequencer clock outputs a steady stream of pulses, at a medium tempo, with a regular and stable amplitude pattern (figure 4.16).

Time

Figure 4.16. Sequencer pulse stream when the joystick is in centre (resting) position.

The "chaotic" sequencer function is not technically chaotic (in mathematical terms).

The designation can be taken to be qualitative.

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The mapping functions a and b determine, however, that deviations in the x and y axes of the joystick result in more complex behaviors in the pulse stream. The parameter slot to which a is mapped represents a multiplication argument for the sequencers clock frequency and base amplitude. An increase in the signal at JSX, thencorresponding to a left-to-right movement across the joysticks x axisresults in an increase in the pulse streams frequency and amplitude (figure 4.17).

Time

JSX
L

SEQ

Figure 4.17. Sequencer pulse stream when there is a left-to-right movement across the joysticks x axis.

The parameter slot to which the mapping function b is connected represents a chaotic variable in the sequencer function. In short, this single variable determines two aspects of the sequencers behavior: 1. the degree of pulse nestedness, and 2. the probability that successive values read from an internal finite state machine are mapped to the amplitude of the pulse stream. An increase in the value of both of these parameters (corresponding to a bottom-to138

top movement in the joysticks y axis) results in an increase in the systems entropy, where pulse nestedness implies a greater likelihood of frequency multiplication from one pulse to the next (and therefore a greater likelihood of extra pulses being nested into the pulse stream), and where the irregularly patterned output of the internal finite state machine incrementally encroaches on the otherwise linear behavior of the amplitude mapping in the mapping function a (corresponding to the left-to-right movement across the joysticks x axis). Figure 4.18 adds a bottom-to-top movement in the joysticks y axis to the left-to-right movement in the x axis illustrated in figure 4.17. The output of the pulse stream shows the trajectory towards a higher degree of chaos over time.

Time

JSX
L T

JSY
B

SEQ

Figure 4.18. Sequencer pulse stream when there is a left-to-right movement across the joysticks x axis, and a bottom-to-top movement across the y axis. The increase in the signal at JSY results in a greater

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likelihood of nestedness in the pulse stream, and a greater likelihood of irregularities in amplitude patterns.

The perceptual guiding of left-hand actions in surfing the fractal wave is more integrated than figure 4.18 would suggest. While the joystick operates across two degrees of freedomthe x and y axesthe performer does not break the activity down into separate movements in two dimensions (as figure 4.18 would indicate). Rather, the performer guides the left-hand through singular trajectories across a two-dimensional space. And its in these motions that a feel develops for the sequencers stable and chaotic regions, the transitions between then, and for the shift from greater-to-lesser and lesser-to-greater degrees of event density with respect to time. But these motor patterns constitute only one part of the coordinated left hand/right hand movements that amount to surfing the fractal wave. And while its useful to break the activity down into left and right hand sub-tasks, there can be no complete picture without considering how these sub-tasks coordinate and cooperate. The output of the chaotic sequencer is mapped to parameters in each of the five discrete audio synthesis networks. While each of these networks encapsulates different dynamical responses, there are strong symmetries between their behaviors, and between the kinds of responses that right hand actions might elicit from each of the networks. Each of the five synthesis networks implements a resonator function, where the pulses that are mapped into each of network serve as excitors. These resonators embody different resonance models (with different dynamical responses), but there are certain
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perceptual constants from one network to the next. Figure 4.19 shows the mapping from local busses to two of the five discrete audio synthesis channels.

1
Pulse Stream GATE WIDTH RESONANCE

C1.1 C1.2 C1.3

Audio Network

C2.1 C2.2 C2.3

Audio Network

3,4,5

Figure 4.19. Perceptual symmetries in the functional mapping from busses to the audio networks across distinct channels. Percepts (Gate, Width, Resonance) are assigned to corresponding busses across each channel. The symmetry holds at the level of hardware, where rows of knobs in Mr. Feelys Channel Section correspond to rows of busses in the diagram.

High level percepts are symmetrical across each of the five channels, where each of those percepts corresponds to the same bus number assignment in each channel. That is, Gate corresponds to busses C1-5.1, Width corresponds to busses C1-5.2, and Resonance corresponds to busses C1-5.3. This has the

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effect of similar classes of response being elicited from corresponding knobs in each of the five channels of Mr. Feelys Control Section. Of course, these percepts require a symmetry in terms of the effect of functional mappings into each of the discrete audio synthesis networks if their particular perceptual qualities are to be discerned and distinguished. The Gate mechanism is functionally identical across all five channels: turning the corresponding knob from left to right has the effect of allowing a greater number of pulses to pass through a gated input to each resonator. It acts, then, as an event filter on the pulse stream, where no pulses are passed to the resonator system when the gates value is zero, all pulses are passed when the gates value is one, and each pulse in the stream has a 0.5 probability of passing when the gates value is 0.5. The implementation of the Width mechanism varies slightly from one channel to the next, but its effect is symmetrical: turning the corresponding knob from left to right has the effect of loosening the elasticity of each resonator; i.e. a tighter elasticity (implemented as a shorter impulse response in the delay lines in the resonators filterbank) will result in shorter output events, whereas these events will take on longer durations (correlating to the perception of having a greater temporal width) as the resonators elasticity is slackened. The Resonance mechanism is the most varied in terms of implementation across the five channels. It is tied in specifically to parameter nodes in the resonator that change the resonators dynamical responsiveness; i.e., the resonant frequencies, their bandwidths, and the ways in which the filters that

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comprise the resonators internal filterbank interact. Across all five channels, turning the Resonance knob from left to right tends to shift the dynamical response of the resonator increasingly towards distortion, self-oscillation and nonlinear behavior. In the breakdown of right hand and left hand tasks in surfing the fractal wave, there is a correspondence to each of the three characteristic behaviors of bimanual asymmetric action that Kabbash et al. point out. Its worth addressing each point in turn: 1. The left hand sets the frame of reference for action of the right. In the surfing the fractal wave model, left hand movements give contour to the dynamical unfolding of the pulse stream, while the right hand acts as an event filter on the stream, and a modifier of the dynamical properties of the events that emerge from pulses hitting the resonator functions. The pulse stream, as it unfolds, is the frame of reference for the picking and shaping of discrete events that characterizes right hand actions. 2. The sequence of motion is left then right. This follows from the first point: the right hand modifies the event stream only after the left hand has given the stream its dynamical contour. But unlike Kabbash et al.s corresponding example (the left hand grips the paper, then the right starts to write with the pen), the respective actions form a continuous interplay of complementary motionsas opposed to a sequence of isolated eventsand the transference from left-handed to right-handed motions takes place at a much finer granularity of temporal scale.
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3. The granularity of action of the left hand is coarser than that of the right. In surfing the fractal wave the left hand is designated to control the joystick. These joystick manipulations do not require the hand to reposition itself across discrete points on the control surface, and they do not require grasping, turning, or other finger motions that are performed at a fine granularity of scale. Ive found that in playing with the model, my left hand will often span the distance from the joystick to the top row of knobs in Mr. Feelys Channel Section, leaving the little finger to move the joystick through the two dimensional plane while the thumb and pointer finger turn the knobs. But even this action is of a coarser granularity than the actions designated to the right hand; actions that involve a constant hopping between the fifteen knobs that comprise the Channel Section, and finely detailed turnings and twiddlings of those knobs. Its interesting to note that in the act of playing, left hand activities do not seem to require any conscious attention, while the right hand activities demand on-going and focused attention. That the dominant hand should be at the centre of attention in the midst of bimanual action is not a point that Kabbash et al. discuss, but it seems that my experience of this phenomenon with surfing the fractal wave might also apply to other activities, such as Kabbash et al.s corresponding example: the left hand brings the painters palette in and out of range, while the right hand holds the brush and does the fine strokes onto the canvas. The two key aspects to the model of activity in surfing the fractal wave are the surfing aspect, and the engineering of the interface around habitual

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embodied patterns of handedness. Its these aspectsor, more specifically, the entangling of these aspects in the midst of performancethat give the model its idiosyncratic kind of resistance. In contrast to the pushing the envelope model, in which events are initiated when the performer transmits kinetic energy to the instrumental mechanism, the surfing the fractal wave model is built around a persistent stream of events. And these events can go by very fast. Motor patterns, then, emerge not only in the interdependencies between the two hands, but in the coordination of the hands with respect to timing constraints. Its been interesting to note that, over the period of time that Ive worked with this model, and as my hands have become both better coordinated and more individually dexterous, Ive had a better capacity to deal with the systems unfolding in a timely manner, and this in turn has led to a higher level of detail and nuance in both the shaping of individual sounds at the event level, and in the elaboration of larger scale events, such as phrases and gestures. This seems to me indicative of the coevolution of sensory, motor and cognitive competencies that is definitive of enaction.

Summary
The conventional metaphors of computer science tend to regard computation as an inherently sequential process. That is, as a function from input to output comprised of a series of discrete and causally related steps, where the desired outcome of the function is known in advance of its execution. This is at odds with the enactive model of interaction, where activity takes place across a network of interacting components, and where the behavior of those components, and
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therefore of the network as a whole, is adaptive and emergent with respect to the ongoing push-and-pull of interactional dynamics. An enactive digital musical instrument, then, will depend on a fundamentally different view of computation to that of conventional computer science. Rather than falling back on the computation-as-calculation model, computation would be viewed as a process in which the pieces of the model are persistent entities coupled together by their ongoing interactive behavior (Stein 1999:483). This model of computation-as-interaction underlies the design of Mr. Feelys software system. The system allows for human action to be folded into the dynamical processes of interacting network components, and to that extent it also allows for a structural coupling of performer and instrument. Structural coupling is not, however, a given property of the system; while the software system provides the required technical infrastructure, the kinds of resistance that the instrument affords to the human remains a matter of how the infrastructure is utilized; i.e., a matter of design. And the right kinds of resistancesat least with a view to structural coupling, realization and enactionwill be those that are neither so transparent to human action that they demand little thought or effort, or so ungraspable that they forever remain beyond motor and cognitive capability. I suggested in chapter 2 that while there is much to be learned from the physical modeling of conventional acoustic instruments, the focus of my work is directed more towards the development of instrumental behaviors that are indigenous to computing media. The examples Ive outlined in this section point, however, to a kind of physical model, in that they embody networks of dynamical
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dependencies in which human action is resisted by forces that are immanent to the software network. But in contrast to physical models of conventional instruments, the virtual physics of these systems is speculative; i.e., the models are not based on data from real world measurements, or on differential equations that describe well known physical systems. Rather, they are evolved interactively through experimentation with various mapping and calibration schemes. So, while the components of the audio synthesis network certainly continue to play a critical role in the instruments behavior, the focus of development is shifted to the mapping framework. Im suggesting that its through this shift that we see the potential arise for what I have called an indigenous computer music. In the approach Ive taken, design choices as to kinds of resistancei.e., classes of behaviorare effectively decoupled from audio synthesis implementations, leaving the designer free to experiment with any manner of sound-producing and processing components. Ive found that the right kinds of resistances, however, continue to be those that are resonant with phenomenal experience and past practices of embodiment. Essentially, this means that the simulated physics of resistance will bein some way or otherfunctionally related to physical descriptions of real world behavior. The design of these systems, then, takes a middle course between normative and speculative modes of interactivity; between that which is familiar and that which is other to every day phenomenal experience. If the balance between these two poles is apposite, then the kinds of resistance that the systems afford will be sufficiently rich in dynamical potential that, over a sustained period of time, the performer will continue to realize new practices, and new ways of encountering the instrument.
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4.5

Prospects

The two usage examples Ive outlined in this chapter demonstrate just a small number of possible approaches to engineering the kinds of resistance that digital musical instruments might store in potentia. In my work with Mr. Feely, as both designer and performer, it seems Im still just scratching at the surface of these matters, and that there are a great many implementational possibilities yet to be uncovered. It also seems that at a certain point, these uncoverings will necessarily require the development of patterns, in both design and performance, that are of a higher order than those Ive outlined to this point. For design, this will likely be a matter of evolving a body of general principles that might be employed such that design knowledge can be added to incrementally. At first glance, this may appear to contradict my observation at the beginning of this chapter that the task of arriving at a universal template for the design of enactive instruments may be ultimately impracticable. But the issue Im raising here is more directly concerned with arriving at general principles that operate at a higher level of abstraction than purely implementational concerns. The concern, rather, would lie with the way in which models might be generated from a consistent but open-ended application of principles that emerge from the interaction between philosophical and technical problematics. This would be a kind of meta-design. Rather than persistently hopping back and forth between philosophical and technical discourses, there would exist an evolving metric for balancing the constraints of one against the other in an integrated framework. At this point in my work, I cant say for certain how one would go about putting
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such a framework together. But problems such as these are not without precedent in the history of design,5 and it seems to me a potentially very productive avenue of investigation. The development of higher order patterns in performance is also a matter of balancing opposing constraints. As Ive been careful to make clear, the two usage examples Ive outlined in this chapter embody very different kinds of resistance, and therefore afford very different varieties of human action. Its interesting to consider, though, how these models might be interleaved in the context of the same performance. This kind of multitasking is part and parcel of expert musicianship. And while the two usage examples I outlined in the previous section might involve a certain degree of multitasking in and of themselves, there is a higher order of multitasking that could potentially encompass both models simultaneously. At the same time that this may eventually lead to more complex and diverse sonic utterances, it may also lead to a heightened sense of flowof performative embodiment. In considering the merging of the two models into a single integrated model, it would seem that they are in fact so different in playing technique as to be incompatible. Again, the issue comes back to design. Multitasking must necessarily involve some degree of compatibility between the actional patterns that comprise the sub-tasks. In designing for multitasking, then, it may prove useful to have in store some metric of actional distance between the kinds of

For example, see Alexander ([1964] 1997).

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motor activities that different models afford. The balancing of these constraints may prove to be difficult. But again, such approaches are not without precedent in design.6 With or without these higher order design methods, the products of design will invariably afford opportunities for action that were at no point factored into the design process. This has certainly been the case with conventional acoustic instrumentsand is perhaps definitive of so-called extended techniquesand theres no reason to assume that the situation should be any different for digital musical instruments. Its been interesting for me to note that, the more I play with the surfing the fractal wave model, the more Im able to isolate certain quirks and glitches in the system.7 These kinds of discoveries constitute an important aspect of the learning process; not just because they can be assimilated into the accumulating motor and sonic vocabulary, but because in certain cases they can lead to entirely new avenues of investigationavenues that would have remained closed had the system been insulated from random environmental inputs in the first instance. There is a stochastic element in enactive process, and this element is accounted for in the contingencies of environmental dynamics. The glitch, then, is simply folded into the enactive model of interaction. Its appearance or suppression in performance becomes a

For example, see Wild, Johnson and Johnson (2004). It's also interesting to note that, at least to this point, the "pushing the envelope"

model has yielded no such interesting anomalies.

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matter for human intentionality. Either choice will lead to the appropriate refinement of actional dispositions.

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Groundlessness

Whatever comes into being dependent on another Is not identical to that thing. Nor is it different from it. Therefore it is neither nonexistent in time nor permanent. Nagarjuna, Mlamadhyamakakrik XVIII:10

The important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy

The main thing is that you forget yourself. Barbara McClintock

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The structure of our language typically leads us to characterizations of interaction that focus on one side or the other of the interactional loop. Humans use technologies, technologies determine humans, and so on. These are, of course, the unavoidable products of a subject/object syntax, and my writing in this essay has not been immune to the lopsided characterizations of interaction that such products embody. But despite the inevitable linguistic constraints, Ive sought to describe the inherent circularity of the continuous interactional unfolding that is definitive of enactive process; a process that is not concerned with subjects and objects, but with relations, linkages, heterogeneity, and the dynamic momentum of the emergent system that arises in the relations and linkages between heterogeneous elements. One of the more radical outcomes of Varela, Rosch and Thompsons outline of an enactive cognitive science is the model of subjectivity that necessarily follows from enactive process. Its precisely because enactive process concerns the processual transformation of the past into the future through the intermediary of transitional forms that in themselves have no permanent substance (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991:116), that enactive theory necessarily implies a groundless or selfless selfi.e., a self with no permanent substance; a subjectless subjectivity (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). This is the non-self that appears in the experience of flowin an unselfconscious, active and embodied participation in the dynamical unfolding of real time and spaceand its the same non-self that vanishes the moment that attention is turned inward, and perception is geared towards abstract contemplation of the objectness of things in the world.
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In this essay, I have not dealt with the epistemological or ontological implications of an enactive approach to design in any significant manner. But to my mind (however that may now be defined), its precisely these implications that are most critical when thinking about design, or when implementing implementations. If an implementation might afford the potential to undermine essentialist ways of beingi.e., if the performative way of being that it brings about is concerned with the unfolding of relations rather than the ordering of thingsthen I would say that the implementation in question has utility, and that the epistemological and ontological qualities that it embodies necessarily imply an ethics. At various points throughout the essay, Ive invoked Heideggers use of the term equipment. In Heideggers terminology, an equipment is a tool that presents itself to human perception and intentionality as something-in-order-to. That is, it affords a particular utility. It would be easy enough to arrive at the conclusion that, in designing a digital musical instrument, we are designing something-in-order-to-perform-music. While the statement is obviously true, it is not, I think, a conclusion. An enactive approach to digital musical instrument design would necessarily account for the realizational potential of the instrument; i.e., a potential which would lead to an incremental unfolding of relationality, and which at the same time would serve as the measure of the instruments resistance. The concern for design, then, is directed towards designing an encounter. Or, its directed towards designing something-in-order-to-not-besome-thing. In this respect, computers have a significant potential.

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