The Tesseract: using the body’s movement to shape my compositional practice.

The aim of this research project is to challenge my practice as a popular music songwriter and producer. To achieve this, I have developed a theoretically informed dance/movement paradigm to shape sound and provoke alternative production methodologies within my compositional practice. My work questions how concepts from Modern Architecture, The Bauhaus, Laban Movement Theory, Dance Movement Therapy and the psychology of movement can be coherently integrated into my technologically-mediated creative practice.

Inspired by Laban Movement Theory, I have created The Tesseract. This is the culmination of research investigating how I can create a compositional system that enables the mapping of my body’s movement to parametric control in custom audio effects and what are the performative and psychological implications I encounter arising from this system. The Tesseract allows me to integrate my intuitive physical movement and embodied cognition to create an interactive and dynamic means of sculpting sound in space. The Tesseract provides me with a compositionalkinaesthetic feedback tool that provides an auto-ethnographic reflection on my long established compositional methods and how these have changed as a result of this research. The tactility and physicality of controlling sound through movement offers a fundamentally different experience of working in a studio: one in which the perception of what is occurring sonically at any given moment can be immediately reconfigured through movement projection.

Ultimately, this research project facilitates the integration of The Tesseract as a theoretically informed way to shape sound through movement and a technologically mediated means for mindfulness. Through creating works in this way, I investigate connections between Dance Movement Therapy and psychotherapy as it relates to embodied cognition, memory, and trauma.