The lecture will take place in TANNA SCHULICH HALL, followed by a catered reception in the lobby of the Elizabeth Wirth Music Building. This event is free and open to the general public.
Registration
No registration is required for this event.
**CIRMMT Students wishing to have their attendance tracked for awards eligibility, please make sure to scan the QR code available at the entrance of Tanna Schulich Hall.
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Abstract
This lecture introduces concepts developed in my upcoming book, Body Music: Phenomenologies of Sonic Gesture to be published in 2026 by Goldsmiths Press and distributed by MIT Press and Penguin/Random House. Body Music is a musician's account of the relationship between corporeal movement and musical sound. I am interested the visceral engagement of the body in musical performance, and how technological mediation can foster, or break, forms of audience empathy. The book 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. 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, including with biomedical technologies of electromyogram (EMG) muscle sensing. Using signals of the body with sound signals through processes of interactive machine learning provides a possible humanistic response to the challenges posed by artificial intelligence.
Biography
Atau Tanaka conducts research in embodied musical interaction. By using muscle sensing in performance, the human body becomes a musical instrument. He studied electronic music with Ivan Tcherepnin at Harvard University. There he met John Cage during his Norton Lectures. Tanaka went on to carry out his doctorate with John Chowning and Max Mathews at CCRMA Stanford. Atau has carried out research at IRCAM Centre Pompidou, Apple France, and Sony Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) Paris in areas of interactive music, immersive media, network performance, and human-data interaction. His work, solo and in groups like Sensorband and in collaboration with Lillevan, Cicanoise, and Dane Law has been presented at Ars Electronica, ZKM, WOMAD, Sónar. In Montreal, he has performed at MUTEK, the Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT), FCMM, la Fondation Daniel Langlois, and has been on the board of the InterSociety of Electronic Art (ISEA). His performances in the Japanese avant-garde scene has been captured in the electronic music documentary, Modulations by Iara Lee. A collection of Japanese sound art curated by Tanaka has been released by the SFMOMA. His work in thinking of the body as musical instrument has been exhibited at the Musikinstrumenten-Museum Berlin. His research has been supported by the European Research Council, UK and French research councils. He was artistic co-director of STEIM Amsterdam and has held visiting positions at the Bristol Interaction Group, TU Berlin and MSH Paris Nord. He is co-director of the Centre for Sound, Technology & Culture at Goldsmiths University of London.