Congruence in Music and Movement Enhances the Perception of Sports Routine Quality

Abstract

Most studies of music and sports relate to the ergogenic effect of synchronization between music and movement in repetitive sports activities. As in dance, music is clearly important for sports routines that involve choreography. This study performs an experiment involving a rhythmic gymnastics routine to investigate whether increasing the congruence between music and movement enhances the quality of sports routines from a musical perspective. In preparing the video stimulus, the original music accompaniment was replaced with a new composition to increase the congruence between music and movement using six musical parameters that parallel dance, including tempo, rhythm, phrasing, accent, direction and dynamic. Fifty-two undergraduate music majors participated in the study and evaluated two videos of the same routine, one with the original music and the other with the new music. The participants completed a three-part questionnaire: the first part evaluates the perceived congruence between music and movement in terms of the six parameters, the second part evaluates acrobatic qualities, and the third part evaluates athletic qualities. The results show that the intended congruence was perceived as significantly improved in the routine with the new accompaniment, and both the acrobatic and sports qualities were also perceived as significantly improved.
 
 Keywords: perceived congruence, sports routine, music and movement, choreomusical, music and sports

Enhancing Visual Perception of Sports Quality in Rhythmic Gymnastics Routine by Increasing Congruence between Music and Movement

“…Given the same movements in both videos, except for motivation, sports qualities that include energy, stamina, confidence, excitement, and level of interest were rated significantly higher in the more congruent model of the video. The better rating of the qualities in this article also corresponds with the data from the same research project [17] on a significantly higher rating for acrobatic difficulties such as amplitude of jumps, smoothness of rotations, and the intensity of the apparatus. While many cross-modal studies examine the interaction of a particular parameter with subjects in the context of analogy or metaphoric conditions [61], this experiment examines the effect of parameters in their actual setting and emphasizes the significance of music in altering the visual perception of a movement.…”

“…However, the issue of suitability, interpretation, and appropriateness of music used in the routine is still discussed, such as in figure skating [12], rhythmic gymnastics [13,14], synchronized swimming [15], and Tai Chi [16]. Based on the cross-modal interaction and the congruence between music and movements derived from the concept of dance, and audio-visual subjects related to film and multimedia, our study found that congruence between both subjects improved the visual perception of acrobatic levels [17]. This is based on the fundamental parameters gathered from the field of dance, sports, and audio-visual subjects, which are phrasing, tempo, rhythm, accent, dynamics, and pitch direction.…”

“…This routine is interestingly performed. Before looking at the results about the sports qualities, the perceived level of congruence between the six parameters in two videos was reported in the same project to examine the difficulty of acrobatic level [17]. However, this data required to be stated here to demonstrate the correlation between the level of congruence and sports quality.…”

Learning Music Through Rhythmic Movements in Malaysia

“…Rhythmic movement is naturally embedded within oneself which makes it as the strongest and closest musical elements in a human's life (Linkins, 2015). This is not only true in music education, the importance of rhythmic movements is also reflected in many other fields, including its association and level of congruence with other human body movements (Loo & Loo, 2012;Loo & Loo, 2015;Loo & Loo, 2017;Loo, Loo & Chua, 2019) such as in sports routine and dance (Hodgin, 1992;Mason, 2012), and as an indirect learning of heritage education with popular music beats (Loo et al, 2016).…”