Sonic Entanglements with Electromyography: Between Bodies, Signals, and Representations

TL;DR

This paper explores how electromyography (EMG) interacts with sound and music, revealing its complex role as an embodied, performative signal that challenges traditional notions of transparency in musical performance and body representation.

Contribution

It offers a phenomenological analysis of EMG in musical contexts, highlighting its performative and defamiliarising effects on performers' embodied practices.

Findings

EMG challenges the idea of being a transparent body signal.

Performers experience EMG as 'present-at-hand', altering their self-perception.

EMG enables new performative possibilities in musical practice.

Abstract

This paper investigates sound and music interactions arising from the use of electromyography (EMG) to instrumentalise signals from muscle exertion of the human body. We situate EMG within a family of embodied interaction modalities, where it occupies a middle ground, considered as a ''signal from the inside'' compared with external observations of the body (e.g., motion capture), but also seen as more volitional than neurological states recorded by brain electroencephalogram (EEG). To understand the messiness of gestural interaction afforded by EMG, we revisit the phenomenological turn in HCI, reading Paul Dourish's work on the transparency of ''ready-to-hand'' technologies against the grain of recent posthumanist theories, which offer a performative interpretation of musical entanglements between bodies, signals, and representations. We take music performance as a use case, reporting on the opportunities and constraints posed by EMG in workshop-based studies of vocal, instrumental, and electronic practices. We observe that across our diverse range of musical subjects, they consistently challenged notions of EMG as a transparent tool that directly registered the state of the body, reporting instead that it took on ''present-at-hand'' qualities, defamiliarising the performer's own sense of themselves and reconfiguring their embodied practice.