Body Music: Phenomenologies of Sonic Gesture
Atau Tanaka
Aug 2026 · MIT Press
Ebook
240
Pages
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Eligible
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infoThis book will become available on August 4, 2026. You will not be charged until it is released.
About this ebook
On the visceral engagement of the body in musical performance, and how technological mediation can foster, or break, forms of audience empathy.
Body Music: Phenomenologies of Sonic Gesture is a musician’s account of the relationship between corporeal movement and musical sound. It examines the conscious and subconscious strategies behind musical expression, and ways in which sound and gesture become the medium of intersubjectivity with the spectator. It looks at the design of technologies that break out of the binary brittleness of the digital to capture subtleties of human movement to create expressive digital musical instrument systems. Drawing from the overlapping fields of phenomenological philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and post-humanist anthropology, the book unwraps the performer as materially and digitally entangled with the sonic. Body Music joins a growing literature in music and gesture and embodied music cognition and responds to challenges posed by the "performative turn" in music theory and aesthetics. It connects these insights with fields of cognitive science and embodied human-computer interaction (HCI) to offer a performer-centric approach to developing new sonic technologies. This becomes then a humanistic response to the challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Theory and practice are interwoven, with vignettes describing seminal concert performances by musicians like Michel Waisvisz, Laetitia Sonami, and Elaine Mitchener. These stories, drawn from personal musical experience, on tour and in the concert hall, situate us in a musical life at the heart of experimental, avant-garde practice.
Body Music: Phenomenologies of Sonic Gesture is a musician’s account of the relationship between corporeal movement and musical sound. It examines the conscious and subconscious strategies behind musical expression, and ways in which sound and gesture become the medium of intersubjectivity with the spectator. It looks at the design of technologies that break out of the binary brittleness of the digital to capture subtleties of human movement to create expressive digital musical instrument systems. Drawing from the overlapping fields of phenomenological philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and post-humanist anthropology, the book unwraps the performer as materially and digitally entangled with the sonic. Body Music joins a growing literature in music and gesture and embodied music cognition and responds to challenges posed by the "performative turn" in music theory and aesthetics. It connects these insights with fields of cognitive science and embodied human-computer interaction (HCI) to offer a performer-centric approach to developing new sonic technologies. This becomes then a humanistic response to the challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Theory and practice are interwoven, with vignettes describing seminal concert performances by musicians like Michel Waisvisz, Laetitia Sonami, and Elaine Mitchener. These stories, drawn from personal musical experience, on tour and in the concert hall, situate us in a musical life at the heart of experimental, avant-garde practice.
About the author
Atau Tanaka conducts research in embodied musical interaction at the intersection of human computer interaction and gestural computer music performance. He is a member of the EAVI (Embodied AudioVisual Interaction) research group, which carries out cutting-edge research across topics including motion capture, eye tracking, brain computer interfaces, physiological bio-interfaces, machine learning, and auditory culture. Atau has previously been Artistic Ambassador at Apple, researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, and professor and guest professor in Japan, France, and northeast England.
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