Using Contemporary Technology in Live Performance: The Dilemma of the Performer

The use of computers in live performance has resulted in a situation in which cause-and-effect has effectively disappeared, for the first time since music began. Once we started to use computers in live performance – to interpret gestures and generate sound as a result – the age-old relationship between gesture and result became so blurred as to be often imperceptible. In historical terms, this problem is extremely recent, involving only the last few decades of musical practice preceded by at least thirty thousand years of music-making by conventional (acoustic) means. The aim of this paper is to show how this affects contemporary performance and the relationship between the performer and the audience.