A Body Knows the Pattern

Excerpts of NIME 2026 performance of "A Body Knows the Pattern"

A Body Knows the Pattern is a performance piece linking movement and muscle tension to rhythmic phrase and texture. Percussive improvisations and samples are shaped, recombined, and placed in dialogue via the body, interspersed with sculpted layers of noise, drone, and field recordings—ultimately describing a dynamic sense of presence in the lived relationship of the body to the world.

The piece was debuted in London, UK in 2025 and has continuously evolved through live performances since. It is part of longer-term research on how embodied musical knowledge translates to digital formats, and builds on prior composition work on microtiming. The work has also been a platform for practice-based research into musical interaction design.

My goal was to build a performance system for presenting microtiming-based electronic music work in a live context. This included the capacity to improvise and engage with the present moment using my body, and to make embodied aspects of electronic music performance more visible to an audience. I was also curious how I could develop more advanced technique and expressive subtlety with this type of system, and what I could learn about embodied rhythm in the process.

I started by analysing my own movement-rhythm associations, as a basis for the system and compositions. I filmed myself improvising gestures while table-tapping percussive phrases at the same time, then looked for common trends in how my movements related to phrasing. From this, I designed several movement-based “instruments” in Max, and also trained a lightweight machine learning model to recognise certain gesture types.

Snapshots of the development and rehearsal process with wearable sensors.

Based on this, I designed several pre-composed “sections” of the piece, each with different relationships between the sensor data and the resulting sound. Each of these gave me a structure to improvise within, with clear parameters and limitations, but enough flexibility to respond to the moment. I iterated and adjusted these sections carefully by practicing with the system, so that the outputs would feel intuitive and responsive to my body. The result is an interactive system that functions as a composition with both fixed and improvised elements, offering a platform for the exploration of embodied relationships with electronic sound.

Thematically, this piece explores a sense of intimacy, listening, and dialogue in the body's relationship to its daily environment, while posing questions about the ways we absorb influences from our surroundings and reflect them back outward in our musical expression. What does it feel like to be living in a body engaged in this dialogue, and how can we express that through interactive musical performance? How can this lived, embodied experience influence both composition and performance practice with computer-based music?

I built this piece’s sonic world from processed field recordings and samples of my living space, using similar strategies to the KHSHK series, while also further developing the improvisatory rhythmic language of those works. This sonic material mirrored the piece’s theme, while further blurring the boundaries between my body and its surroundings. Composing this work offered a prism through which to investigate and speculate on these complex relationships, and how they influence the translation of embodied experience into digitally mediated sound.

I had support in this work from Atau Tanaka, Patrick Hartono, Mira Benjamin, and Moss Freed at Goldsmiths, University of London. Some of the strategies I used are discussed in this paper, and iterations of this performance work are also available in the proceedings of NIME and MOCO.