This doctoral project is situated within the field of artistic research and grounded in my own practice as a professional clarinetist. Designing and performing within new electro-acoustic instrumental systems is the foundation for the approaches and methods developed. The exploratory nature of the project moves forward in an iterative process where the artistic tracks of designing and performing within these systems are developed in parallel with the reflective tracks of observing and analysing the behaviour of these systems.

Analysing musical performance—using a combination of qualitative methods like stimulated recall and open coding, together with quantitative data collection of movements—can help to gain a deeper understanding of how gestures carry musical meaning and how this is related to embodied music performance. The project seeks to answer questions on how to maintain and encourage the performer’s embodied relation with acoustic musical instruments and their visceral and multilayered expressive potential, while opening up for the vast possibilities of digital sound manipulations and the sonic extensions they engender.

Within my doctoral project, three artistic laboratories have served as the sites for the exploration of electro-acoustic instrumental systems that I have designed and utilised in my artistic practice. Creating new electro-acoustic instrumental systems is, as Lachenmann stated about his own compositional practice, akin to “building an instrument” (2004, p. 56). Performing within these systems demands an intimate relationship between the musician's body and the sound-producing elements in the system. This pursuit of a new “blueprint” (Lachenmann, 2004, p. 57) builds on experimentation within these systems.