Format: eight minute percussion duo with live electronics.
‘Cuticles’ is a percussion duo with live electronics that explores the overarching theme of our connectedness to our own bodies and those of others. This piece is one along a long line of enquiry initially sparked by a quote from an essay by the Italian philosopher Georgio Agemben, where he discusses ‘…living in the intimacy of a strange being,’ which is the agential force behind our bodies’ somatic processes that can be very unpredictable, inscrutable and ungraspable but through which our experience of the world is nonetheless continuously mediated. It is my artistic provocation that we are very often alienated from our connections to this mysterious other in spite of the very large number of artificial ways we can now monitor its deliberations, from smartwatches to VR headset position sensors.
This particular piece circles the topic of skin as a hybrid of the natural and the artificial. Lotions, antiperspirants and moisturisers absorb into and interact with the skin in ways that change its behaviour and appearance, giving outward impressions of tamed, self-contained and regulated bodies in accordance with social norms. At the same time, a second aspect of what I term the development of the ‘technology of the skin’ is that it is is an increasingly common means by which we can reach others across great distances through the internet. Smartphones and related technologies use touch and haptic sensations as primary avenues of communication, and those connections are mediated through skin.
The artificial intelligence aspect of the piece is in a sound-identification algorithm system I created to find and sample short snippets of human non-verbal sounds from internet sources. The algorithm was trained, using a pre-existing model with CreateML, on a variety of these sounds from the application of moisturiser to throat-clearing, and then sent into the wild on Internet Archive sources and YouTube videos. These specific kinds of sounds were chosen because their sense of bodied-ness seems to survive the brutal processes of sound recording, digitisation and anonymisation, although the sounds themselves are unrecognisable at the time of performance. At the same time, the proliferation of potential source material, ranging from cosmetics tutorials to ASMR, is itself a sociologically interesting phenomenon. The intimate moments of applying lotion, throwaway utterances, and fleeting interpersonal connections make their way into a vast digital commons from which the AI makes its selections, isolating and therefore amplifying, raising sociological questions pertinent to this conference.
The AI, in many senses another ‘strange being’ that I seek to engage with rather than admonish, also occasionally makes incomprehensible decisions, hearing human bodies in traffic noises and heavy machinery. The sounds of the live performers, together with the bodily and seemingly unrelated sounds that the AI has selected, form something of a meta-commentary with respect to our alienation from our own bodies despite our paradoxical interconnectedness with one another through our most visceral senses. I present this here not offer a moral condemnation, but rather to highlight the absurdity of using technologies that can offer so much potential for (re)connection to our own bodies’ are instead more likely to be used to monitor toilet breaks in Amazon warehouses.
The samples are triggered by the two percussionists via contact mics as they mostly use their skin to create soft and fleeting textures, friction sounds and emergent polyrhythms on the surfaces of their instruments. These triggered sounds are blended with the samples using a timbral fusion algorithm, creating a form of skin-to-skin contact between the anonymous, ‘out there’ others selected by the artificial intelligence, and the live performers.
Type of submission
The piece requires two percussionists, two floor toms, two snare drums, and a cymbal, and so would be ideal for the Performance 1 category in the Wolfson College auditorium. The live electronics requirements are not particularly complex, but I request that AIMC provide the performers.
Technical/Stage Requirements
Two floor toms
Two snare drums
A cymbal
5 contact mics (I can supply)
Audio interface (I can supply)
Laptop (I can supply)
Mixer and stereo PA system.
Program Notes
‘Cuticles’ is a percussion duo focused around the concept of skin as a barrier between us and the world, and technologies of skin as both a way controlling and taming its outward appearance and a way of interfacing with consumer electronics. The piece fuses the live sounds of the percussionists with those harvested by an AI algorithm, which is trained to scour the internet for non-verbal bodily sounds. Cuticles functions as a commentary on our alienation from our own bodies, and way of offering glimpses at reconnection as we watch two bodies coordinating together in a room with the sounds of strange others being pulled in from the digital periphery.
The authors would like to thank Neko3 and Impuls festival for making this work possible.
Ethics statement
The sampled sounds used in this work were collected from the public sphere, and are anonymised, and cannot be traced back to their source by the time they are stored. The longer recordings from which the samples were isolated are stored temporarily but securely deleted. All stored files are encrypted with the AES-XTS algorithm. The sounds themselves contain no identifiable information or meaningful utterances, and none of these sounds are reproduced in their original form in the performance itself.
The AI algorithm is lightweight, runs on my personal laptop computer, and as such, has limited environmental impact.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
