Manual Actions Expressive System (MAES) in mixed electronics and improvisation
- Submitting institution
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University of Keele
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 783
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- This is a composition and accompanying software
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- January
- Year
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
-
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- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Manual Actions Expressive System (MAES) consists of a composition (La Jaula Invisible (The Invisible Cage), for saxophone, Manual Actions Expressive System, MAES; optional video-mapping/dancer), Journal article: Fischman, R. 2013. A Manual Actions Expressive System (MAES). Organised Sound 18(3): 328-45, and software system (MAES Max externals and system). The composition was commissioned by the Electroacoustic Laboratory KLEM and Zorrotzaurre Art Work in Progress (ZAWP), Bilbao, Spain. The premiere of the work took place at La Trenza Sonora Festival, National Conservatory of Lima, Peru, 2016. Subsequent performances took place at Keele and La Escucha Errante Festival, Bilbao (both 2016).
MAES enables music creation and performance using natural hand actions, fostering the preservation of strong links between the causality of gestures and everyday experience of the world while yielding sound that is a believable result of the performer’s natural actions. Gestures are fully programmable through mapping of hand motion and finger bend, allowing performers to concentrate on natural actions from our daily use of the hands while enabling expressive content and sonic sophistication with simple hand gestures: MAES can be used by individuals who do not have formal musical training because the performing gestures are already ingrained in their neuromuscular system. Yet, it also enables virtuosity in the compositional structuring and articulation of sonic material to a level comparable to outputs produced in the electroacoustic studio. Subsuming complexity also articulates sonic manipulation within a larger sonic environment in which, just like real life, we act within our independent surroundings and our actions modify the latter, but do not control it totally. While initial work focused on the use of the MAES system on its own, the research embodied in the submitted outputs expand its scope to an approach to mixed music; both composition and improvisation.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
