This article tackles the issue of playfulness in biosignal-based performance with digital musical instruments. The practical context is that of an interactive sound sculpture performance, entitled Ominous, for the Xth Sense, a biophysical musical instrument. This work posits that a prominent quality of the body physiology is its emergence. Developed by cultural theorist Brian Massumi, the notion of bodily emergence is useful to inform playfulness in musical performance for it can be used to understand a performer’s body as being continuously changed by physiological and autonomic processes. This article presents a strategy for musical interaction that uses the relations in time and intensity of two biosignals to make the musical instrument adapt to the performer’s physiological states. This strategy is put into practice by implementing a system that, drawing upon findings in biomedical engineering, brings together biosignal feature extraction, multidimensional mapping and digital neural networks.

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