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Musical expressiveness is a concept that is difficult to formalise by quantitative data and its analysis usually relies on some sort of subjective evaluation. Today there is a growing interest in methods and cues used to extract, quantify, analyse and synthesise these expressive intentions. This have been done mainly through the audio analysis of music performances, identifying the acoustic parameters capable of describing their expressive content. This study expands acoustic analysis methods for investigating the expressive intentions of musicians, incorporating information about their body movements during musical performances. It presents a method to define and analyse the physical gestures executed by the musicians while playing their instruments, and to extract motion parameters that can be quantitatively related to their expressive intentions and to the musical structure. The gesture consistency of 13 clarinetists is evaluated during several performances, establishing an objective relation between their expressive gestural patterns and the music structure of two selected excerpts, by Mozart and Brahms. A method is defined to represent, segment and analyse the patterns of recurrence on motion data during musical performances. Recurrent physical gestures were extracted during clarinet performances and analysed based on gestural features, comparing different musicians, musical passages and experimental conditions. Results indicate recurrent sequences of clarinet gestures in regions of the excerpts that were shown to be related to key musical moments. A corresponding analysis is conducted over the acoustic data, searching for related parametrical patterns that could validate the results of the motion analysis. The information obtained can be used to define an integrated method to parametrise and quantify the expressive intentions of musicians. This method could be incorporated to musical synthesis, recognition, analysis and teaching systems, or used in theoretical studies in musicology, human cognition and physiology, ultimately defining a musical meaning for the physical gestures of musicians during their performances.

The influence of music on the human brain has been recently investigated in numerous studies. Several investigations have shown that structural and functional cerebral neuroplastic processes emerge as a result of long-term musical training, which in turn may produce cognitive differences between musicians and non-musicians. Musicians can be considered ideal cases for studies on brain adaptation, due to their unique and intensive training experiences. This article presents a review of recent findings showing positive effects of musical training on non-musical cognitive abilities, which probably reflect plastic changes in brains of musicians.

In this study the movement patterns of ten expert musicians are quantitatively related to expressive timing patterns and the music structure during performances. The hypothesis is that ancillary gestures recurrently employed are closely related to expressive intentions, and that the expressive content imposed in key musical passages is thus reflected in the patterns of gestural recurrence. A movement and an audio analysis of 30 clarinet performances of a Brahms' excerpt are compared. Results show direct correlations between the recurrence pattern of clarinetists' ancillary movements and expressive bar duration manipulations employed by them, associated with melodic phrasing and harmonic transitions.