Broadening Telematic Electroacoustic Music by Affective Rendering and Embodied Real-time Data Sonification

Often played in traditional music performance formats, much recent telematic electroacoustic music focuses on the relationships between people/machines and geographically distributed cultures/spaces/players, and/or it adopts electroacoustic music’s historical concerns with natural environmental sound art or space manipulation. But a more suitable environment for telematic art works is perhaps found in the inter-relationship between ‘players’ and broader contemporary networked life – one embedded in multiple real-time informational data streams. While these streams are often rendered visually, they are also partly interpreted through embodied cognition that can be similar to music and sonic art interpretation. A fruitful meeting point for telematic electroacoustic music and real-time data sonification is in using affective composition/performance and an affective/embodied means of data sonification. To illustrate this, one means of rendering affective telematic electroacoustic music is outlined, and a bridge to one form of real-time data stream representing collective embodiment put forward – forex data rendering – as an example. Amalgamating these approaches in telematic electroacoustic music allows dialectic between networked performers/composers and clusters of collective behaviors. Artistically, this facilitates the notion of how small groups of individuals might plot course(s) of action that are often altered by external pressures, therefore demonstrating a means of exploring participants’ placement in contemporary environments.