Components of passage

Music for solo instrument and electronics creates a special challenge in the concrete and vivid character of the live performer versus the abstract and fixed character of the speakers with their invisible electrical signals. Composers have tried to bring the two worlds together by creating fields of contact between them; Kontakte by Stockhausen is a prime example of how timbral and gestural similarities connect the acoustic and electronic sound material. Developments in the field of live electronics have made it possible to fuse the two worlds by using microphones and motion sensors together with machine learning and gesture recognition. New connections are created as the electronic sounds may be triggered by the motions of the musician and similarly the electronic part may be able to listen and react to its surrounding. In plateau eleven in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari talk about how the movements, colours and calls of the bowerbirds forms an assemblage of heterogeneous components that together constitute a machinic statement. They also describe how matters of expression emerge from such components and give an example of how leaves of grass with the Australian grass finches become a component for passages between assemblages. Similarly, one may regard music for acoustic instruments together with electronic sounds as a special assemblage of enunciation. By utilising the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and their concepts of heterogeneous components, rhizomatic connections, and machinic assemblage, one may reconsider the relation between the instrumental and electronic parts as a question of connections between components and passages between assemblages, rather than similarities and interactions between two worlds