In Resonance

What would it mean to accept the human condition as fundamentally prosthetic—incomplete without technological supplementation? Looking anew at the intertwined careers of David Tudor and Pauline Oliveros, two celebrated voices of postwar experimental and electronic music, In Resonance positions this question as central to their work. Drawing on firsthand interviews and exhaustive archival research, Walker Downey illuminates the pair’s vital yet little-documented friendship and creative exchange, which took shape around a shared exploration of the human entanglement with and reliance on a technological other. Downey traces this entanglement through Tudor’s virtuoso pianism and handmade circuitry, Oliveros’s reel-to-reel tape experiments and meditative listening practices, and the cross-disciplinary networks of dancers, poets, artists, and engineers in which both musicians moved. What emerges is a portrait of two friends and collaborators who came to embrace incompleteness as grounds for endless self-invention.