• 法乐 (To face the music)

This electronic music performance project aims to recontextualise the rattan cane as an interface for electronic music. The rattan cane has heavy historical baggage, from both colonial and confucian frameworks of discipline and punishment. Through this act, the historical baggage of the cane is integrated into it, while its original purpose of punishment is being transformed, allowing the object to become a site of expression with agency rather than somatic subjugation.

The impetus for this work is deeply personal. Growing up in a Chinese Singaporean household, encounters with the rattan cane were formative — not as exceptional events, but as ordinary ones. Peers shared similar experiences; the cane appeared across domestic spaces, school corridors, and the national legal apparatus alike. This normalisation is not incidental. Singapore's practice of judicial and scholastic caning is a direct inheritance of British colonial penal law, which institutionalised the rattan stick as a standardised instrument of compliance. Simultaneously, deeply rooted Confucian frameworks — centred on filial piety, hierarchical obedience, and the moral imperative of 管教 (controlling-teaching) — sustained and expanded the cane's reach long after colonisation ended. These two historical forces, Western and Eastern, converge in the object itself, making it an unusually dense site of cultural memory. The question driving this work was not whether the cane's history could be erased, but whether it could be faced — and transformed — without forgetting.

The intended audience is broad but the design problem is specific: how do you critically engage with an object so overdetermined by its punitive function that any aesthetic re-examination risks either trivialising its violence or being wholly consumed by it? The performance work 法乐 (To Face the Music) addresses this by treating the cane not as a symbol to be displayed, but as an interface to be inhabited. The title itself enacts this tension: 法乐 (fǎ yuè) translates literally as "law music," a deliberate misremembering of the phrase "家有国法" (the state has its laws), where the word for "law" (法) replaces the more domestically appropriate "rule" (规). This substitution reflects how the cane felt in childhood — not as a household regulation, but as something absolute and unchallengeable. The English translation, "to face the music," layers on a second meaning: the idiomatic confrontation with consequences, pointing to the shared logic of discipline across private and public spheres.

The theoretical scaffolding for the recontextualisation draws on three intersecting frameworks. Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology, developed in Specters of Marx, provides the central metaphor: just as Marx's wooden table undergoes a transfiguration from an ordinary object into an animated, dancing thing animated by unseen forces, the rattan cane is stripped of its mechanical punitive function while remaining structurally haunted by it. Transforming the cane into a musical instrument does not exorcise its history; rather, it performs a deliberate conjuring trick, allowing the spectre of corporal punishment to linger as an invisible phenomenological weight. Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality gives this haunting its political dimension, articulating how power is not merely a top-down legal concept but a mechanism physically invested in the body — what Foucault calls "anatomo-politics." The cane's prior utility is rooted entirely in this paradigm: enforcing authority through the direct application of physical pain to a subjugated body. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Structure of Behavior then offers the route of transformation: by continuously mapping the cane's acceleration and rotation in real space, the boundary between the performer's inner intention and the physical object dissolves. The cane is absorbed into what Merleau-Ponty calls the "phenomenal body," no longer an external weapon but the direct vehicle for expressive action, achieving the highest level of "symbolic behavior" where the object is no longer merely a sign but is itself signification.

Technically, the instrument was built across several iterations. An MPU6050 motion tracker — incorporating both a gyroscope and an accelerometer — was embedded into the cane, outputting six values: acceleration across three axes (ax, ay, az) and rotation across three (gx, gy, gz). This data is transmitted in real-time via a microcontroller to Max/MSP, where it feeds generative audio algorithms. Critically, no physical strike is required to produce sound. The kinetic data of the performer's gestures — swings, rotations, holds, thrusts — is the instrument. This mirrors Autechre's compositional approach of "process over product," where the underlying data system, rather than the acoustic output, constitutes the musical work. It also draws from 65daysofstatic's Fugue State For E-Bows and Guitar, which similarly decoupled a traditional instrument (the electric guitar) from human mechanical causality by replacing physical contact with an Arduino-driven electromagnetic system. Visually, three metres of braided red wires extend from the base of the cane, trailing the performer's movements with a slight delay — a striking visual metaphor for the violence the object carries, and an intentional echo of the ornamental string attached to the 戒尺 (ruler) used in ancient Chinese classrooms.

The performance is structured as a triptych — Overture, Fugue, and Etude — each exploring a different register of the cane's transformation. Overture functions as an introduction, beginning with the cane resting in floor holders while a low ambient hum plays. The performer enters and kneels before the instrument, a ritualistic gesture marking the cane as sacred before the first movement begins. As the performance builds — through swings counted by the gyroscope, through a texture generator processing manipulated speech samples, through a Euclidean rhythm click modulated by the cane's rotation — the piece moves from contemplation to turbulence. Fugue narrows the focus, taking the perspective of the object itself. Inspired by Tai Chi's slow, controlled movements, it asks what it means to be an instrument of violence without agency. Stochastic programming ensures the system does not always respond to the performer's gestures, creating glitchy, unreliable feedback — a sonic metaphor for the cane's own compromised interiority. Bell-like tones, distorted by rotation into an autotune-like instability, close the piece as the performer sinks to one knee: where the opening kneel was sacred, this one signals defeat. Etude, developed in response to critique feedback, strips the mapping to its most transparent form — three gestures, three sounds — shifting from demonstration to expressive composition as the performer gains fluency. Its sound design borders on distortion: sharp hi-hat clicks against heavy, dense kicks, filled with mechanically alien textures drawn from MRI dissonance and Autechre's generative structures.

The conclusions drawn from this work are several. Most significantly: the aesthetic transformation of a punitive object does not require the erasure of its history to be meaningful — it requires its acknowledgement. The cane's authority in 法乐 is never neutralised; it is redirected. The performer does not play the cane despite its history but through it, and the audience's perception of every gesture is informed by the weight of what the object has historically done. This "aesthetic distance" — the substitution of dramatic synthesised audio for the familiar visual of a strike — functions as an estrangement effect, preventing passive emotional empathy and compelling a more critical, visceral confrontation with the psychological and historical trauma the object carries. The work also arrives at a formal conclusion about instrument design: that an object need not be purpose-built to function as a digital musical instrument, and that the conceptual and historical weight of a found object can itself become a compositional parameter. Future development of this methodology would benefit from expanded user testing beyond the artist-practitioner, allowing diverse performative approaches to emerge and generating comparative case studies in embodied human-instrument interaction.

Ultimately, 法乐 proposes that facing the music — in every sense of that phrase — is an act of reclamation. The rattan cane is finally granted a voice that does not belong to the institution, the parent, or the state. It belongs to whoever is holding it.