*Duty* explores sonic possibilities and human limits, harnessing the bodily convulsions produced by electrical impulses to control seven performers in a work composed in one octave for fourteen handbells. The title of the work refers both to the movement of a bell and the imposition of physical obligations—or duties—upon the performers.

The work creates a distributed system where the artist/composer executes motor actions in the performers via electric muscle stimulation (EMS). A composition converted to MIDI triggers two custom-built EMS devices, which deliver electrical impulses to specific points on the performers’ arms via electrodes attached to their skin, causing their muscles to contract and generating pre-determined involuntary movements at changing velocities. Variations in voltage, frequency and pulse width dictate different muscular responses in the performers, ranging from unnatural jolts to abnormally fast movements.

*Duty*uses the induction of involuntary movement to explore the way physical (and psychological) constraint can determine a musical outcome and extend sonic possibilities. Expanding the potential of the human body beyond conscious control, the use of electric muscle stimulation enables experimentation with complex rhythmic structures and fast movements that the performers would be unable to achieve of their own volition.

Overriding the messages that the central nervous system sends to the muscles to control action achieves one of the primary aims of mid-20th century experimental music practice. Disrupting a performer’s physical agency in the creation of sound achieves the kind of Cage-ian “non-intention” previously sought by experimentalists, which aimed to free the performer from the shackles of his or her own preferences and habitual actions.

The application of EMS to musical performance provides a novel way to explore the interface between technology and live performance, and raises interesting questions regarding creative agency in the creation of music. The transmogrification of the performers’ body as an input/output device literalizes aspects of musical performance, where musicians frequently describe feeling like conduits or transcribers of a creation that is not their own. A perverse take on Schoenberg’s (1911) claim that “art is born not of ‘I can’ but of ‘I must’,” *Duty* explores the liminal space between didactic execution and free interpretation inherent in all musical performance.

In a broader sense, *Duty* questions assumptions about agency and free will both in musical performance and everyday contexts. An enquiry into the nature of agency within systems where cognition is distributed across people, objects and environment through technologies of connection, *Duty* explores what happens when embodied experience and sense of agency is disrupted or extended. As the performers engage in this strange but not entirely unfamiliar negotiation they create a distorted reflection of the struggle for control that occurs both in and beyond the context of musical performance.


Links: http://www.michaeladavies.net/duty.html

Commissioned for Sonic Social, curated by Performance Space at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2014.

Performers: Claire Conroy, Nick Rayment, Matte Rochford, Reuben Alexander, Jodi Clark, Louise Maloney, Mark Cauvin Hardware development: John Hirsch, Richard Allen

Michaela Davies (AU), her cross-disciplinary practice is informed by an interest in the role of agency both in and beyond the context of musical performance. Using electric muscle stimulation and other methods to obstruct and extend human capabilities, her work has been presented at venues and festivals including the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Institute for Cultural Enquiry (Berlin), Experimental Intermedia (New York), ISEA (Sydney), Mona Foma Festival (Hobart), and Sonica Festival (UK). Davies has a PhD in psychology and was recently awarded a Creative Australia Fellowship from Australia Council for the Arts.