Tactile Scores - Session 1

Metadata: 09-10 Feb 2026, DeSingel, with participation of classical music students.

In Tactile Scores we did not begin from a written score; instead, we built one from a set of materials and objects that force decisions about timing, density, duration, relation, and silence. Wood, felt, vinyl, jute, and textile operate as tactile propositions. Their weight, resistance, elasticity, and spatial behavior shape how musical structure comes into being.

Participants worked as an ensemble to negotiate what each material might mean musically. Through handling, arranging, cutting, tensioning, and spatializing these objects, they construct tactile scores that are then rehearsed into short performable pieces. Interpretation becomes compositional method: sound emerges through participatory sense-making, collective agreement, repetition, and adjustment.

The workshop extends my ongoing research into touch as an artistic and pedagogical medium. It applies approaches which I work towards establishing touch-led dramatic inquiry framework to a musical context, positioning participatory artistic practice as a bridge toward educational methodologies. In this setting, tactility functions as a practical epistemological entry point into universal design: knowledge, structure, and authorship are generated through shared embodied negotiation rather than visual dominance or technical hierarchy. By shifting compositional thinking from visual notation to embodied interaction, the process foregrounds collaboration, accessibility, and material intelligence as an entry point into music-making.

Metadata: Video documentation of playing each other's scores.

Each participant then moved to another's score and performed it without instruction or explanation. This cross-performance was not framed as an exercise in accuracy but as an inquiry into whether the tactile propositions embedded in each score carried enough shared meaning to generate consistent musical interpretation across participants.

That the cross-performance held - that participants could stand before one another's material assemblages and produce interpretations consistent with the original maker's intention, without any verbal exchange - was not a minor result. It indicated that the collective negotiation carried out in the opening phase of the workshop had produced something transferable. This transferability of interpretation across participants points to something more consequential than workshop success. It suggests that the shared material vocabulary, collectively established through participatory sense-making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007) in the opening phase, generated a notational coherence that persisted beyond the conditions of its making.

De Jaegher, H., & Di Paolo, E. (2007). Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6 (4), 485-507.

Metadata: Video documentation of playing the final composition built collectively by the participants.

In the final phase, participants listened to one another's scores performed in sequence. From this listening, a collective negotiation began: some scores contributed elements that were absorbed into the emerging structure; others were set aside entirely. New material was added to bridge what remained. The group arrived at a single collective score through selective integration and incremental construction.

The performance of this final score extended the argument of the cross-performance phase in a specific direction. Playing from a shared material assemblage built through collective authorship, participants produced a sonic result in which the material logic of the objects remained present within the music. The resistance, texture, and spatial behavior of the materials continued to operate as compositional information rather than being subsumed into conventional instrumental expression. Discord, where it arose, functioned as structural accuracy. This cross-modal coherence suggested that the shared material vocabulary had proven generative enough to sustain not only individual interpretation but collective authorship at the level of the score itself.

Taken together, these outcomes position tactile score-making within the broader argument of universal design. The process demonstrated that compositional coherence, authorial legibility, and interpretive transferability can be generated through embodied material negotiation, without recourse to visual notation or technical hierarchy. The tactile score functions as an epistemological entry point that reorganizes the conditions of music-making rather than supplementing them. What remains open is whether this reorganization holds across different participant configurations, institutional contexts, and degrees of material unfamiliarity, and what pedagogical structures might be needed to support its repeatability.