Towards an Aesthetic of Electronic-Music Performance Practice

The performance of electronic-music shows a large number of different practices, some displaying cunning interfaces that minutely track physical motions, while others refuse the display of any performative actions on behalf of the performer. With today's availability of largely inexpensive interfaces, the choice of a particular performance practice does not come as a technological necessity but as an aesthetic decision. This paper proposes a method to aesthetically evaluate the different performance practices that have emerged in the past decades in electronic music. Thereby the goal is to get a better understanding of the differing concepts of performance in electronic music. Since a fixed typology of performance practices proved not to be a suitable approach, a description of the practices by means of a parametric space is proposed. After the introduction of the various parameters, the application of the parametric space is demonstrated with five different examples.