A Body Knows the Pattern

A Body Knows the Pattern is a performance piece mapping movement and muscle tension to aspects of rhythmic phrase and texture, debuted in London, UK, 2025. Percussive improvisations and samples are shaped, recombined, and placed in dialogue with one another via the body, interspersed with sculpted layers of noise, drone, and field recordings, ultimately describing a sense of dynamic presence in the lived relationship of the body to the world.

The work is part of longer-term research on the translation of embodied musical knowledge to a digital music context, and builds on prior composition work with microtiming and expressive variation.   It has also provided a platform for practice-based research into musical human-computer interaction, with some published papers available here.

Following several works exploring percussive microtiming, I wanted to explore more explicitly how this relates to the body's movements and experiences. I also wished to build an improvisation-friendly performance system for presenting microtiming-based electronic music work in a live context. Experiments with hardware samplers, sequencers, and contact mics offered partial solutions, but I was seeking a more direct relationship with the physical tension-and-release underpinning embodied expressive timing, and a means of making this visible to the audience.

To create this work, I conducted a detailed analysis of how my gestural movements related to my sense of percussive phrasing, developing a movement language to use in performance and while also identifying specific correlations useful in design. To create the performance system, I captured both muscle and movement data via wearable sensors, and used both direct mapping and lightweight machine learning to craft complex relationships between this data and a library of phrases, patterns, and textures. I had support in this work from both Atau Tanaka and Patrick Hartono at Goldsmiths, University of London. More details on the mapping process are discussed in this paper.

Sonically, I continued the lo-fi and field recording-based aesthetic of the KHSHK works. The intention was to describe a sense of intimacy in the body's relationship to its environment, and the ways in which we absorb influences from our surroundings and reflect them back outward in our musical expression. The construction of this performance system created a prism through which to investigate and speculate on these relationships through their translation into a digital format, while providing a platform for harnessing embodied knowledge directly in improvised, rhythm-focused experimental music.

Iterations of this performance work are available in the proceedings of NIME and MOCO, with more publications and documentation to follow.