Live performances involve complex interactions between a large number of co-present people. Performance has been defined in terms of these performer-audience dynamics, but little is known about how they work. A series of live performance experiments investigate these dynamics, through teaching a humanoid robot some stagecraft, contrasting live and recorded performance, and spotlighting the audience. This requires the development of methods capable of capturing the fleeting responses of people within an audience and making sense of the resulting massed multi-modal data. The results show that in live events interaction matters. Extending the idea that our experience of performance is shaped by interactions with others, namely by talking with people afterwards, analogous social patterns are identified within the event. Specifically, some of the interactional dynamics well established for close, dyadic encounters extend to performers and audience members, despite the somewhat anonymised nature of massed audiences. While individual performer-audience effects were identified, the primary axis of social interaction is shown to be between audience members. This emphasises how it is being in an audience - common across diverse performance genres - that shapes the experience of live events. This work argues that the term liveness is ill-defined, but need not be. These interactional dynamics have a functional basis and depend solely on what is externally manifest. Understanding liveness in this way allows a perspicuous account - relating the perceptual environment within the event to the social contingency of experience - and can provide a systematic basis for design.

Using the generative processes developed over two stages of creative development and the performance of The Physics Project at the Loft at the Creative Industries Precinct at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) from 5th – 8th April 2006 as a case study, this exegesis considers how the principles of contemporary physics can be reframed as aesthetic principles in the creation of contemporary performance. The Physics Project is an original performance work that melds live performance, video and web-casting and overlaps an exploration of personal identity with the physics of space, time, light and complementarity. It considers the acts of translation between the language of physics and the language of contemporary performance that occur via process and form. This exegesis also examines the devices in contemporary performance making and contemporary performance that extend the reach of the performance, including the integration of the live and the mediated and the use of metanarratives.

Ce mémoire porte sur l’impact des interactions faites par le musicien lors d’une séance d’interprétation musicale en jazz incluant de l’improvisation. L’analyse est basée sur le matériel phonographique et les transcriptions de deux pièces exécutées par le trio composé de Jan Garbarek, le saxophoniste norvégien, Egberto Gismonti, le pianiste et guitariste brésilien, et Charlie Hayden, le bassiste américain. L’analyse fait une comparaison entre les mêmes pièces jouées en studio et en concert live, à partir d’une base théorique incluant le processus de l’improvisation ainsi que les affordances, concept emprunté à la psychologie écologique et adapté à la musicologie. Les résultats de cette recherche indiquent que le processus d’improvisation est affecté par les invariants liés à l’environnement de performance. Cette analyse est un premier pas vers une compréhension contextualisée des éléments environnementaux qui influencent l’improvisation dans la musique jazz. / The following master’s thesis considers the impact of the interactions affecting a musician during a jazz performance including improvisation. The analysis considers the phonographic source material and transcriptions of two tracks performed by the trio composed of the Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, the Brazilian pianist and guitarist Egberto Gismonti, and the American bass player Charlie Haden. The analysis focuses on two tracks that were both recorded in studio and live during a concert of the trio, and is based on the theoretical notions of improvisation as well as affordance theory, which was originally developed in the field of environmental psychology and then adapted to musicology. The results of this research indicate that the process of improvisation is affected by the invariants relating to the location of the performance. This analysis is a first step towards a contextualized understanding of the environmental elements that can influence improvisation in jazz.