What does the 21st-century conductor look, sound and feel like?
This doctoral research project asks two interconnected questions: What forms of conducting emerge when gesture, sound and musical agency become entangled with contemporary technologies?
And how can technology expand conducting beyond traditional techniques and scoring materialities to become a catalyst for discovering new ensemble intra-actions and musical aesthetics?
Rather than asking how technology can simply be added to conducting, this project explores whether existing concepts of conducting are still sufficient for contemporary artistic practice. Through practice-led research, it investigates conducting as an expanded artistic practice in which gesture, performers, AI and interactive systems open new possibilities to shape one another.
Drawing on posthumanist performativity, assemblage theory and divergent performance, this research explores how technological entanglements redistribute musical agency, transform perception and embodiment, and generate new musical aesthetics. Artistic experiments with gesture sensing, sonification and AI investigate how the conductor can become an audible, performative presence within the ensemble, opening new forms of interaction and musical expression.
Therefore, the aim of this project explores conducting as a creative, compositional and performative practice for the 21st century.
Supervisors: Paulo de Assis (Orpheus Instituut, Gent), tbd
This research is conducted within the international doctoral programme docARTES.
Update: July 2026
