Rethinking the Transmission Medium in Live Computer Music Performance

Abstract

Transmissions require the encoding, communication and decoding of meaningful information across some medium or other. Historically, both the artist and the scientist have tended to treat physical space (and the sound wave in particular) as the medium by which music and sound are transmitted. This paper argues against this conception of the sonic medium and presents an alternative model in which embodied human cognition is treated as the sonic medium. This offers a fuller and more accurate portrait of both transmissions and drift. It allows for the exploitation of the embodied cognitive medium to support the encoding, communication, and decoding of meaningful information to an extent that the physical medium alone does not. It also allows for a transmission to undergo radical drift within the contexts of fashion, genre and cultural situation while retaining its original embodied meaning.