This project emerges from a sustained engagement with limitation as a creative methodology. Across a body of work spanning more than a decade, including Feather Hammer (2011), Machines (2013), Three Preludes (2013), Rococochet (2017) and Bird Rib (2020), I have repeatedly found that self-imposed constraints generate productive thinking that would otherwise remain out of reach, opening new expressive possibilities and forcing unfamiliar modes of engagement with musical material. Each of these projects, however, operated within my habitual body: a trained keyboard player’s ingrained relationship with tonality, harmony, melody and the physical instrument through which musical ideas are typically conceived and realised.

This project represents a deliberate departure from that pattern. Rather than curtailing my practice, it seeks to disrupt it at a more fundamental level, by temporarily stepping away from the primary interface through which my musical cognition has been formed and expressed. Working exclusively with the Behringer LM Drum and the Hologram Electronics Microcosm, and surrendering melody and harmony as ways of organising musical ideas, I aim to discover which aspects of what my body knows are tied to a specific instrument and which can transfer across different interfaces. My keyboard-trained body is not removed from the process. What the experiment does is route my musical thinking through an unfamiliar set of physical and sonic constraints, creating conditions in which ingrained habits cannot operate as usual and must be, at least partially, negotiated consciously.

The primary theoretical framework I am drawing on is Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the habitual body, the site of pre-reflective, ingrained bodily knowledge, and the actual body, which must negotiate unfamiliar conditions consciously (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). This distinction, elaborated in cognitive science contexts by Gallagher and Zahavi (2008), gives me language for what is at stake when a musician works outside the interface through which their musicality has been consolidated. As Leder observes, and Gallagher and Zahavi cite approvingly, a skill is fully learned when it “comes to pervade my own corporeality” (Leder, 1990, cited in Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008): this experiment asks what happens when those conditions are removed.

Brown’s (2004) taxonomy of modes of compositional engagement provides a second sustained theoretical framework, particularly the Player/Instrument relationship, which characterises the intimate, intuitive mode of working that mastery makes possible. It is this mode that my experiment disrupts, and Brown’s framework offers a vocabulary for tracking how my relationship with the new interface develops over the course of the project. I am also drawing more selectively on Gibson’s (1979) notion of affordances, to describe how the new constraint environment restructures the field of musical possibility; on Latour’s (2005) account of distributed creative agency, to consider how compositional thinking shifts when the relationship between composer and tools changes; and on Csikszentmihalyi’s (1996) work on flow, to frame the experiential dimension of the inquiry, particularly the question of where productive absorption ends and frustration begins.

Three methodological complexities are worth acknowledging upfront. First, the boundary around melody and harmony is not fully enforceable: the Behringer LM Drum frequently incorporates tuned elements and pitched samples, and the line between rhythmic and melodic material is not always clear. The Microcosm adds a further layer of complexity, being a multi-effects pedal capable of generating textural and evolving material from rhythmic input, and it has its own capacity to blur the boundaries between rhythm, texture and tone. Rather than treating this as a problem, I regard it as part of the experimental territory. The constraint is therefore not about the total exclusion of pitch but the removal of tonal and harmonic language as a way of organising musical ideas, and of the keyboard as the physical means of accessing it. Second, the drum machine is its own interface with its own learned gestures, and I expect familiarity to develop relatively quickly. The experiment is not therefore about maintaining a permanent state of unfamiliarity, which would be neither possible nor meaningful, but about tracking the transition from unfamiliarity towards new forms of embodied knowledge. It is in that transitional process, and in what it reveals about how musical habits form, transfer and reform across different interfaces, that the primary research data resides. Third, I am not attempting to separate the unfamiliarity of the interface from the unfamiliarity of working without pitch and tonal language, because the two are inseparable in this case: leaving the keyboard is simultaneously leaving tonal and harmonic frameworks that I am most familiar with. Rather than treating this as a problem, I regard it as theoretically interesting. My inability to determine, from within the experience, whether a particular thought or difficulty arises from the unfamiliar interface or the absence of tonal language is itself evidence that body, instrument and musical syntax function not as separate variables but as a single integrated system, a position supported by recent work in embodied and enactive music cognition (van der Schyff et al., 2018).

My hypothesis is that working outside the keyboard-instrument relationship will make normally instinctive compositional decisions conscious and effortful, and that being forced to think about decisions I would normally make without thinking will make visible aspects of musical thinking that habitual fluency renders automatic and invisible. I also hypothesise that surrendering tonal and harmonic language will shift the basis of my compositional decision-making towards rhythmic, durational and textural parameters, and that this shift will be visible both in the music itself and in my written reflections on the process. The project also asks, without claiming to resolve, whether working outside my primary interface might alter my relationship to it on returning.

The initial practice period is anticipated to span approximately two months. The practice will be documented through a process diary incorporating video diaries, annotated works in progress, and session notes, tracking both the iterative development of the work and my evolving experience of unfamiliarity. Brief comparative recordings at the keyboard, made before and after the practice period, will provide a reference point for the question of whether the experiment alters my relationship to my primary interface on returning to it.

At a broader level, this is not just a personal question. By making visible the extent to which musical thinking is shaped by a specific bodily and instrumental relationship, this project offers a provocation for composers working across different interfaces to examine the nature and consequences of their own habituated practice. A notation-first composer, a sequencer-based producer, or an algorithmic composer may each have a differently structured relationship between body, cognition and musical idea; what this experiment contributes is not transferable findings but a sharpened set of questions and a clearer theoretical vocabulary, drawn from phenomenology and practice research, through which those relationships might be examined.

References

Brown, A. R. (2004) ‘Modes of compositional engagement’, Musicology Australia, 27(1).

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996) Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York: Harper Collins.

Gallagher, S. and Zahavi, D. (2008) The phenomenological mind: an introduction to philosophy of mind and cognitive science. New York: Routledge.

Gibson, J. J. (1979) The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Leder, D. (1990) The absent body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/2012) Phenomenology of perception. Translated by D. A. Landes. London: Routledge.

Van der Schyff, D., Schiavio, A., Walton, A., Velardo, V. and Chemero, A. (2018) ‘Musical creativity and the embodied mind: exploring the possibilities of 4E cognition and dynamical systems theory’, Music and Science, 1.