Abstract:
How do listeners formulate narratives from their experience of an electronic music piece? What could this tell us about musical practices grounded in immersive media? In this talk, I will revisit the theory of affordances from the perspective of auditory cognition, focusing particularly on our encounters with electronic music. In doing so, I will propose the concept of diegetic affordances as it’s explained in my recent book “The Cognitive Continuum of Electronic Music.” I will give examples from modern and historical examples of electronic music and frame these with the findings of an extensive listening study. I will then explore how these findings can inform emerging musical practices that leverage immersive media technologies such as virtual and augmented reality systems, where the idea of diegetic affordances can take on a new and more explicit meaning. This will offer us a glimpse into the kinds of opportunities that lie in virtual reality as a medium for musical expression.
Bio:
Anıl Çamcı is an Assistant Professor of Performing Arts Technology at the University of Michigan. His research and multimedia artworks deal with worldmaking at the intersection of human-computer interaction, virtual reality, and electronic music. Previously, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he led research into immersive systems, and faculty at Istanbul Technical University, where he founded the Sonic Arts Program. His work has been featured in leading conferences and journals and received numerous awards. His first book The Cognitive Continuum of Electronic Music has been published by Bloomsbury in 2022.