Characterising musical gestures

Abstract

Despite the widespread use of the term gesture in writings about music, the term is not defined in most musical dictionaries. Moreover, as this paper shows, the term is employed by different writers in a wide variety of ways. One common use of the term refers to sonic instances that are close analogies of physical gestures. These could be termed expressive unit gestures which, like physical gestures, are perceived as a short, unified, expressive events. To enable a more detailed study of these, this paper outlines a systematic approach to their description in the hope that these will open possibilities for a more detailed study of this aspect of musical gestures. The HamNoSys notation was developed for the systematic description of sign language. Gestures of sign language are notated through a systematic profiling of the actions involved (hand shapes, movement types, etc.). By analogy a musical gesture can be described through its auditory properties such as accent patterns, pitch contour, register, and so forth. This paper suggests that studying these expressive unit gestures offers a way of linking the dynamics of the music with expressive potential and can, therefore, contribute to an experiential account of music; could lead to new methods of investigating listeners engagement with music; and could potentially offer new ideas in the field of music information retrieval.

Metaphors for understanding harmony

“…One last possible metaphor for harmonic understanding that I suggest is that of gesture. The term "gesture" to refer to musical phenomena has occurred at least since 1910 and has been growing in importance in recent scholarly work on music and research in music cognition (Ben-Tal, 2012). It is common among musicologists, theorists, and other scholars to understand certain musical aspects as "gestures," thus employing a metaphor of music as body movement.…”

Music conducting functions: A mixed-methods evaluation of theory and survey validity.

“…Second is measurement of music-related motion, with Koch (2003) devising from conducting textbooks a system to distinguish hand gesture velocity into, on, away from, and between beat points. Third, Ben-Tal (2012) recommends the Hamburg sign language notation system for coding the shape, position, movement, and orientation of conducting gestures. Sign language analysis has revealed how conductors incorporate object manipulations and portrayals, body part indications, and culturally encoded signals (Bräm & Braem, 2001).…”

Weak Interactions, Strong Bonds: Live electronics as a complex system

“…We saw in several examples so far how the machine listening utilised in these pieces includes processing of the raw MIR features to infer gestural information, such as the melodic contours collected in Zaum (Section 1.3). This is another meeting point between the way I develop the electronics and my more general compositional thinking in which musical gestures (Ben-Tal 2012) are an important aspect. As noted throughout this section, in each piece the different components are specific – the aim is not to develop a general improvising machine.…”