Marco Donnarumma | Music for Flesh II
Statement
Music for Flesh II (Marco Donnarumma 2011,present) is a solo sonic piece for augmented muscles sounds,
which aims at demonstrating an experimental coupling between unheard sounds of muscle gestures and
corresponding sound synthesis played back through loudspeakers.
Composition was developed as a first milestone of the Xth Sense project, a broader ongoing research which
investigates exploratory applications of biophysical sound design for musical performance and responsive milieux.
The long-term outcome is the implementation of low cost, open source tools (software and hardware) capable of
providing musicians, performers and dancers with a framework for biosensors-aided auditive design in a real time
environment; such framework will be re-distributable, customizable and easy to set up.
Presently Xth Sense technology consists of a low-cost, biosensing wearable hardware device and a Pure Databased
framework for capture, analysis and real time processing of biological sounds of the body.
In Music for Flesh II the only musical instrument available to the performer is his own body. Performer’s voluntary
muscles contractions produce kinetic energy, an acoustic sound which is captured by the biosensor and deployed
as only sonic source. At the same time the biological signal undergoes a feature extraction which provides several
control parameters for the real time processing of muscles sounds.
Performer uses his body not only as a controller, but, more importantly, also as a truly real musical instrument; he
is capable of actually creating music in real time exciting his muscles fibres.
Such paradigm attempts at informing classical gestural control of music and musical performance itself. During the
execution both performer and listeners can perceive an authentic auditive and cognitive intimacy; the neat and
natural responsiveness of the system prompts a suggestive and unconventional coupling of sound and gestures.
One of the major aims of the design of Music for Flesh II was to avoid a perception of the sound being dissociated
from the performer’s gesture. The dissociation I point at does not only refer to the visual feedback of performer’s
actions being disjointed from the sonic experience, but it also concerns a metaphorical level affecting the
listener’s interpretation of the sounds generated by the performer’s somatic behaviour. Therefore, chosen sound
processing techniques were evaluated according to their capability of enhancing the metaphorical interpretation
of performer’s physiological behaviour.