Interpersonal entrainment in Indian instrumental music performance: Synchronization and movement coordination relate to tempo, dynamics, metrical and cadential structure

Abstract

Two complementary aspects of interpersonal entrainment – synchronization and movement coordination – are explored in North Indian classical instrumental music, in the auditory and visual domains respectively. Sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) is explored by analysing pairwise asynchronies between the event onsets of instrumental soloists and their tabla accompanists, and the variability of asynchrony by factors including tempo, dynamic level and metrical position is explored. Movement coordination is quantified using cross wavelet transform (CWT) analysis of upper body movement data, and differences in CWT Energy are investigated in relation to the metrical and cadential structures of the music. The analysis demonstrates that SMS within this corpus varies significantly with tempo, event density, peak levels and leadership. Effects of metrical position on pairwise asynchrony are small and offer little support for the hypothesis of lower variability in synchronization on strong metrical positions; a larger difference was found at cadential downbeats, which show increased melody lead. Movement coordination is greater at metrical boundaries than elsewhere, and most strikingly is greater at cadential than at other metrical downbeats. The implications of these findings for understanding performer coordination are discussed in relation to ethnographic research on the genre.

Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance

“…In brief, future studies could test the prediction that shorter instrument sounds (shorter acoustic envelopes) increase synchronization precision, independent of the music's cultural, genre-specific characteristics. The relationship between precision and greater event density (and tempo, where tempi can be compared fairly; see Clayton, Jakubowski & Eerola, 2019) is similarly independent of corpus when melodic sounds are involved. We did not observe this effect for drum-only pairings, however.…”

“…It is not possible to determine the appropriate beat level-referred to in musicological literature as the ''tactus''-in a completely objective way, which creates problems for comparative analysis. (Within genres however, it is often possible to test for the dependency of asynchrony on tempo: see Clayton, Jakubowski, & Eerola, 2019. ) Our judgement of how fast a piece of music seems to be is also dependent, however, on the rhythmic Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance 163 event density (i.e., the number of distinct event onsets per second), and this factor can be estimated objectively.…”

“…It is less clear from the literature how to analyze the longerscale processes of coordination through which musical structures are aligned. Since coordination seems often to be manifested in coordinated movement, however, previous studies provide some precedents as to how this may be achieved using time-series data derived from video or motion capture data (Clayton, Jakubowski, & Eerola 2019;D'Ausilio et al, 2012;Eerola et al, 2018;Glowinski, Badino, Ausilio, Camurri, & Fadiga, 2012;Glowinski et al, 2013;Jakubowski et al, 2017). In the comparative data analysis we present in the section Measuring Entrainment in Musical Ensembles of this paper, synchronization is studied using an asynchrony-based approach pioneered by Rasch in the 1980s: the novelty of our analysis is in applying this method to diverse corpora, increasing the reproducibility of onset detection and comparing six very different musical traditions.…”

Musical Interaction Reveals Music as Embodied Language

“…A central aim of another of our experiments was to devise a way to capture the dynamics of a singing dyad in order to assess the interaction quality of a hocket performance, focusing on timing (Dell'Anna et al, 2020a). While the main part of studies on timing in pairs of musicians have used some form of correlation of asynchronies or mean signed asynchronies (Goebl and Palmer, 2009;Clayton et al, 2019), the methods remain event-based due to the fact that references that occur are regular time instances, which can be interpreted as subsequent events.…”

Infant-adult synchrony in spontaneous and nonspontaneous interactions

“…First, we explored synchrony from subtle torso movements intending to analyze the temporal and morphological dynamics of the same type of matching behaviors across the conditions. Previous reports indicate that this area of the body is highly sensitive to changes in interactions of participants, which makes it an objective marker of behavioral synchrony [30,[148][149][150][151][152][153][154]. Due to our focus on the torso motion, other behavioral and biological markers sensitive to interactional synchrony were not considered.…”