Expressive Body Movement Responses to Music Are Coherent, Consistent, and Low Dimensional

Abstract

Embodied music cognition stresses the role of the human body as mediator for the encoding and decoding of musical expression. In this paper, we set up a low dimensional functional model that accounts for 70% of the variability in the expressive body movement responses to music. With the functional principal component analysis, we modeled individual body movements as a linear combination of a group average and a number of eigenfunctions. The group average and the eigenfunctions are common to all subjects and make up what we call the commonalities. An individual performance is then characterized by a set of scores (the individualities), one score per eigenfunction. The model is based on experimental data which finds high levels of coherence/consistency between participants when grouped according to musical education. This shows an ontogenetic effect. Participants without formal musical education focus on the torso for the expression of basic musical structure (tempo). Musically trained participants decode additional structural elements in the music and focus on body parts having more degrees of freedom (such as the hands). Our results confirm earlier studies that different body parts move differently along with the music.

The use of metaphorical musical terminology for verbal description of music

“…Music and speech have many aspects in common, such as phonological awareness, which is closely related to pitch awareness (Loui et al 2011) or the similarity that is discovered between musical and language syntax (Koelsch 2011). Music causes extra musical interpretation by urging listeners to articulate explicit linguistic descriptions (Antović 2010:119), but a clear correlation between body movement and linguistic labels has been found (Amelynck et al 2014). Therefore, linguistics is the first discipline from which musicians borrowed terms such as syntax (examines rules how to combine words within a sentence), semantics (the study of meaning), semiotics (includes the study of metaphor, studies meaning making, where sounds present signs of something else), hierarchical structure (music structure is hierarchically organized) that creates meaning or musical connotation in terms of music semantics (Bernstein 1976).…”

The influence of cellist's postural movements on their musical expressivity

“…On en trouve un exemple chez [MacRitchie 2009] qui identifie les mouvements de la tête et du haut du buste des pianistes comme des composantes essentielles pour la structure du phrasé. Mais c'est surtout dans le domaine de la danse spontanée en réaction à la musique que s'applique ce type d'analyse du mouvement d'ensemble [Amelynck 2014]. [Toiviainen 2010] l'utilise notamment pour montrer que les mouvements corporels se synchronisent sur différentes périodicités de la métrique musicale.…”

“…On parle alors de fonctions propres (eigenfunctions) et non plus de vecteurs propres, reflétant les instants auxquels se produisent les plus grandes variations dans le jeu de courbes. De nombreuses études ont recours à la technique FPCA pour interpréter les variations de données collectées par dispositif physique ou de suivi du mouvement [Bianco 2009, Dalca 2013, Amelynck 2014, Visi 2015. Notre approche est originale dans le sens où l'on utilise la FPCA pour comparer des données fonctionnelles de mouvement et de son.…”

Musical Instruments, Body Movement, Space, and Motion Data: Music as an Emergent Multimodal Choreography

“…Quantity of motion (QoM) has been related to expressiveness (Thompson, 2012) and has been used to study the dynamic effects of the bass drum on a dancing audience (Van Dyck et al, 2013), while contraction/expansion of the body can be used to estimate expressivity and emotional states (Camurri, Lagerlöf, & Volpe, 2003). More advanced statistical methods, such as functional principal component analysis and physical modeling, have led to midlevel descriptors, including topological gesture analysis (Naveda & Leman, 2010), curvature and shape (Desmet et al, 2012;Maes & Leman, 2013), and commonalities and individualities in performance (Amelynck, Maes, Martens, & Leman, 2014).…”