Performance Ecosystems: Ecological Approaches to Musical Interaction.” EMS: Electroacoustic Music Studies Network. Available on-line at www.ems-network.org/spip.php?article278. Accessed

Music is understood as a dynamical complex of interacting situated embodied behaviours. These behaviours may be physical or virtual, composed or emergent, or of a time scale such that they figure as constraints or constructs. All interact in the same space by a process of mutual modelling, redescription, and emergent restructuring. (Impett, 2001) As will be self-evident, this is a work in progress. The text is structured around the paper presented at EMS07 in Leicester, but draws freely on a preceding presentation, at the Sonorities Two Thousand +SIX Symposium1, to provide context for and elaboration of, some of its main points. The notion of the performance ecosystem is presented as a fruitful tool for the understanding and analysis of current musical activity2. It is suggested that this mode of understanding usefully alerts us to connections with historical music practices, while enabling us to address the realm of the virtual. The paper will look at a selection of practical projects and performances which have formed a nexus of activity at the University of East Anglia over the past five years, addressing contiguities between composition and performance, performer and instrument, instrument and environment. The bulk of this activity has been the work o