Decoding Individual differences and musical preference via music-induced movement

Abstract

Movement is a universal response to music, with dance often taking place in social settings. Although previous work has suggested that socially relevant information, such as personality and gender, are encoded in dance movement, the generalizability of previous work is limited. The current study aims to decode dancers’ gender, personality traits, and music preference from music-induced movements. We propose a method that predicts such individual difference from free dance movements, and demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method by using two data sets collected using different musical stimuli. In addition, we introduce a novel measure to explore the relative importance of different joints in predicting individual differences. Results demonstrated near perfect classification of gender, and notably high prediction of personality and music preferences. Furthermore, learned models demonstrated generalizability across datasets highlighting the importance of certain joints in intrinsic movement patterns specific to individual differences. Results further support theories of embodied music cognition and the role of bodily movement in musical experiences by demonstrating the influence of gender, personality, and music preferences on embodied responses to heard music.

Exploring relations between Big Five personality traits and musical emotions embodied in spontaneous dance

“…While these studies have identified significant relations between dancing motion and personality, the predictive power of the produced models and correlations is at best modest. However, a more recent study by Agrawal et al (2020) traded the interpretability of bodily features for greater prediction power. Instead of using bodily features extracted by manual selection (e.g., speed or acceleration of body parts, or the distance or angle between them) or by dimensionality reduction (e.g., vertical or lateral speed), they used the covariance among the speed of body parts.…”