#Background to the Research
We use the word "everybody" interchangeably with "everyone" (Cambridge Dictionary 2024), assuming that a body is essential to being human. Having a body and being subject to its needs is perhaps the most fundamental commonality that we share, even if that body differs vastly among different people.
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The first sounds we make the moment we are born are through our body – our vocal tracts, our motor movements and our bodily functions. The first musical instruments augmented what we could do with our body to create a greater variety of sounds, requiring physical movement of fingers and limbs to hit or rub objects together, or for breath to be regulated through pipes and other resonating chambers (Montagu 2017). As we moved from analogue to digital technology however, sound-making became abstracted away from the body, reducing sound to samples that can be created or triggered by lines of code, or simply streamed through a playlist.
This divorce of body from sound in the latter half of the 20th century has, conversely, induced a contemporary shift towards reconnecting once again, with a significant amount of current research and art-making in the field of sound-movement computing, gestural control of musical instruments and embodied sound (Holland 2019) (Stern 2013). Some of the impetus for this shift can be attributed to a need for greater performativity beyond the tyranny of the screen, or a more instinctive and expressive way to manipulate sound (Mainsbridge 2022). Perhaps the biggest driver is simply the development of increasingly powerful and accessible technologies to extract data from our bodies, spurred by the needs of commerce and politics. From accelerometers and gyroscopes to biosensors, infrared and LiDAR sensors, and now computer vision, our bodies are continually tracked individually and en masse through our smart watches, mobile phones and surveillance cameras.
However, the contemporary body is no longer the analogue body of the past, anchored in its material aspect. Like the splintering of our identity into schizophrenic fragments (Jameson 1991), the body has unmoored from corporeality, disappearing into the network to conjoin with other bodies and machines, unlatched even from any coherent temporal sequence.
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#Research Questions and Aims
The aims of my research are to investigate how this expanded concept of the body can instigate, inspire or enable novel forms of participatory interaction that reflect the contemporary digital world that we live in. Once we remove corporeality from the equation and think of the body as multiplicitous and becoming (Massumi 2002), how do the possibilities for embodied interaction similarly multiply? Further, how does an undisciplinary approach intersect with network culture to create multimodal works that draw on repurposing and remixing new technologies with new ways of thinking about the self and identity?
Finally, how does participation involving an expanded body enable sound to be an instigator for multi-layered meaning-making?
These broad inquiries are structured into the following research questions, which guide my investigation and directly connect to the Discoveries section of this thesis:
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1. How can an expanded conception of the body - fragmented, distributed, and mediated through digital networks - enable novel forms of participatory sound-making?
Contemporary digital technologies have redefined the relationship between the body and artistic expression, facilitating new modes of interaction and sonic engagement. This question examines how rethinking embodiment beyond the physical can reshape interactive sonic practice.
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2. How does an undisciplinary and multimodal approach, reflective of network culture, facilitate new methods of participatory sound-making by repurposing and remixing diverse technologies and creative practices?
My research draws from cybernetic theory, post-humanist philosophy, conceptual art, media studies and participatory design to explore how combining disparate technological and artistic disciplines fosters new forms of creative practice. This question examines how an artistic method that embraces a form of network thinking – connecting people, connecting forms and connecting ideas in an open lattice that always reaches out rather than in creates innovative forms of embodied sonic expression.
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3. In what ways can participatory interaction involving an expanded, networked body function as a site for multi-layered meaning-making in sound practice?
It could be argued that a dichotomy has existed between sound art and experimental music, with the former thought to be more aligned to space and conceptual art, and the latter to time and auditory aesthetics. By using a participatory approach with a networked conception of the body, is it possible to blur these distinctions—between space and duration, composer and audience, visual and performance, conceptual and aesthetic—so that sound becomes a mechanism for exploring contemporary anxieties and socio-political structures?
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Through practice-based research, this thesis seeks to articulate how these questions shape new approaches to interactive sound-making. The projects examined in this research investigate how participation, technological mediation, and networked embodiment converge, revealing new possibilities for sound as both an expressive and relational medium.
#Significance of the Research
This research contributes to the discourse on participatory culture in relation to sound practice. While there has been substantial research on the socio-political aspects of participatory art in general, scholarship on participatory sound remains marginal (Keylin 2023), despite the growing prominence of both sound art and participatory art.
Putting aside media-specificity, this research introduces a new perspective on the expanded conception of the body in participatory art. Embodied interactions have been the subject of much research both in the creative arts and Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) fields. However, these have tended to assume a traditional corporeal embodiment and focused on material issues such as movement analysis, mapping strategies and user interface design. This study proposes a methodology for heuristically thinking about the body in terms of different networks to instigate novel interactions.
Lastly, this research contributes to scholarship on undisciplinarity and multimodality in creative practice, reflective of contemporary networks that draw on and feed back into diverse fields. The blurring of boundaries between cultural forms as well as the increased embeddedness of these forms in everyday life due to networked technologies (Jagoda 2016) make it virtually impossible for the contemporary artist to work homogenously, necessitating further research into this area of study and its implications for contemporary creative practice.
#Methods & Methodology
This thesis is grounded in practice-based research (PBR) methodology, which emphasises the role of creative practice as both the process and product of knowledge generation (Candy 2006). Unlike traditional research methods that primarily focus on theoretical analysis or empirical data collection, PBR places creative work at the core of the research process, viewing the act of making as a means of inquiry and discovery. This approach is well-established in the field of sound and interactive arts, where the creation of work facilitates new insights and understandings that might not emerge from purely theoretical or observational studies. Through the making of the creative works included in the accompanying folio and reflecting on them, my practice has profoundly changed. From working primarily with scored notation and acoustic instruments, my practice has expanded to include diverse artistic fields across dance, installation, new instrument-making and new media. As I branched further, new questions and collaborative opportunities emerged in an ever-expanding lattice. This necessitated a huge investment in technical skill development, as well as human resource and production management skills. At the same time, the aesthetic focus of my work evolved from solely musical or compositional considerations to include socio-political meaning-making as I explored contemporary anxieties surrounding human creativity and connection. The practice-based approach I adopted was informed by a constant feedback loop between creative practice, reflection, and theory. Each project—whether it involved interactive sound design, networked collaboration, or embodied performance—became a site for theoretical inquiry, prompting new questions that guided the next phase of making. The broad approach to my research, investigating across multiple fields of study, combinations of art forms and presentation formats, allowed me to discover different aspects of the networked body. My method was reflective of and in response to the fragmentary yet omnipresent network itself. Through practical, hands-on engagement, I discovered new knowledge that can be applied to the design of participatory interfaces within performative and installation contexts, both specifically for sound-making and more broadly to other art forms.
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I have adopted the term undisciplinary to describe my approach of working across boundaries of form, genre and discipline that can at times be interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary (Hadorn et al. 2008) or even postdisciplinary (Pernecky 2019). The term undisciplinary describes an approach that resists the rigid categorisations of traditional academic disciplines, instead embracing fluidity, cross-pollination, and methodological openness. Unlike interdisciplinarity, which seeks to integrate knowledge from multiple fields while maintaining their distinct boundaries, and transdisciplinarity, which aims to transcend disciplinary frameworks to generate new epistemological models (Darbellay 2019), undisciplinarity suggests a deliberate destabilisation of academic conventions, allowing for unpredictable and emergent connections between fields. The term has been used in various contexts, including Rodgers and Bremner’s (2011) notion of alterplinarity, which challenges the authority of disciplinary boundaries in creative and research practices. Similarly, Mitchell et al. (2009) discuss indisciplinarity as a way of breaking free from traditional methodological constraints to enable more radical and experimental forms of knowledge production. In this thesis, undisciplinary is not simply an absence of discipline but an active methodology that embraces the complexities and entanglements of contemporary network culture, incorporating artistic practice, technological research, and theoretical inquiry in a way that reflects the networked body itself.
This undisciplinary approach is particularly crucial for researching participatory sound-making and the networked body, as it necessitates engagement with multiple fields - including sound studies, HCI, digital media theory, and performance studies - without privileging any single disciplinary lens. The increasing embeddedness of networked technologies in everyday life requires a methodological framework that is capable of responding to rapidly shifting artistic, technological, and socio-political landscapes. My research builds upon Marshall and Bleecker’s (2010) argument that undisciplinary work fosters the freedom to navigate between different modes of thinking, making, and theorising, resisting fixed ontologies in favour of process-oriented exploration. By working across music composition, interactive design, digital technologies and participatory performance, my practice-based research embodies this undisciplinary ethos, forging new pathways for understanding the role of the body in sound-making within digital, networked environments. This methodological openness is essential for addressing the emergent and relational aspects of participatory interaction, where meaning is co-constructed through a multiplicity of human and non-human agencies rather than imposed through disciplinary conventions.​