Performance as Laboratory: Embodiment, Memory, and Neuro-Responsive Composition in Contemporary Artistic Research

This article presents a trajectory of artistic research that moves from participatory soundscape studies and collective memory practices towards neuro-responsive systems for electroacoustic performance. Drawing on philosophical perspectives of embodiment, including Aristotle's concepts of aisthesis, praxis and empeiria, as well as phenomenological approaches developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the article argues that listening constitutes an embodied mode of knowing rather than a purely auditory process. The discussion begins with artistic and community-based soundscape research conducted in Mani and Samothrace, where environmental sounds functioned as triggers of autobiographical and collective memory. These observations informed a series of experimental studies investigating vocal improvisation, imagination and neural engagement in response to immersive sonic environments. Building on these findings, the article introduces Hyponoia, a device-independent neuro-responsive framework that classifies recurring performance states through EEG-derived physiological patterns and translates them into compositional behaviours. Rather than treating brain activity as a mechanism for direct control or emotion recognition, the system approaches physiological signals as indicators of embodied musical engagement. The article proposes the concept of performance as laboratory, suggesting that artistic performance can function as a site for generating knowledge about the relationships between memory, perception, embodiment, creativity and technology. Through this perspective, soundscape composition, biomusic and affective technologies become interconnected methods for exploring how bodies, environments and computational systems co-produce musical experience.

1.0 Embodiment and Artistic Knowledge

The relationship between body, perception, and knowledge has occupied a central position within philosophical thought for centuries. From Ancient Greek philosophy to contemporary theories of embodiment, understanding has increasingly been framed not as a purely cognitive process but as something emerging through lived experience, sensory engagement, and action. Within the Pythagorean tradition, music was understood as a manifestation of cosmic order, linking bodily experience, numerical proportion, and the organisation of the world (Burkert, 1972; Barker, 1989). Aristotle further positioned aisthesis (perception), praxis (action), and empeiria (experience) at the foundation of human knowledge. For Aristotle, understanding emerges through repeated encounters with the world, making perception a prerequisite for thought rather than its consequence. This perspective reappears within twentieth-century phenomenology, particularly through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of the lived body (corps vécu). Rejecting Cartesian divisions between mind and body, Merleau-Ponty argued that perception is not a passive reception of stimuli but an active mode of being-in-the-world. Sound, memory, movement, and attention are therefore inseparable dimensions of experience rather than distinct cognitive processes. These ideas have profoundly influenced contemporary theories of embodied cognition. Scholars such as Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991), Gallagher (2005), and Leman (2008) argue that cognition emerges through dynamic interactions between body, environment, and action. Musical understanding is consequently viewed not as the decoding of acoustic information but as an embodied and participatory process involving movement, anticipation, imagination, and affective engagement.