How Musical Rhythm Reveals Human Attitudes: Gustav Becking's Theory

Camurri

2006

Musicae Scientiae

Background in musicology Understanding the gesture-based foundations of musical involvement opens a number of new perspectives for musicology, with the likely effect of a change in approach. Giving justice to the role of gesture in music calls for an integrated view of perception and action, which implies a shift from auditory-based cognition towards embodied cognition, an approach that includes the whole human body as mediator between mental processes and physical energy. Background in computing With the help of new measurement tools, new computational models of multi-modal interaction, and new interactive multimedia platforms, it becomes easier to study music from a multi-modal point of view, both in terms of scientific and artistic perspectives. Music also offers an appropriate domain for the testing and developing of interactive systems and computational models for handling non-verbal multi-modal communication. Aims In studying musical gesture, both musicology and engineering can profit from a joint collaboration. While technology provides new tools for the measurement and modelling of musical involvement, knowledge of its corporeal foundation may largely contribute to the development of technology that in turn contributes to measurement and modelling. Furthermore, this knowledge may be exploited in artistic applications. As such, the interaction between musicology and music engineering may lead to interesting developments in the domain of embodied cognition and interactive multimedia platforms. Main contribution An overview of recent work on the development of an interactive multimedia platform for the measurement and modelling of musical expressiveness is presented. The paper introduces the notion of corporeal imitation and mirroring behavior as a core concept fur understanding musical expressiveness. Implications The approach advocated in this paper implies a shift of paradigm in systematic musicology, away from an all too narrow focus on auditory perception and sound structure, towards a broader view that encompasses multi-modal musical involvement. This approach is grounded in multi-sensory integration, the coupling of perception and action, the study of motor imitation, and issues that relate to affect, emotions and subjectivity. The advantage of using a interactive multimedia platform for music research, rather than ad hoc solutions, pertains to the use of modular functionalities, which allow rapid prototyping of experimental setup, flexible modelling, and the subsequent use of results in artistic applications.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding musical expressiveness using interactive multimedia platforms

Camurri

2006

Musicae Scientiae

“…The concept of a basic gesture can be traced back to Becking (1928), who described the general form of sympathetic movements in response to music as a kind of geometric shape that summarizes the trajectories of a repetitive pattern (Becking, 1928;Nettheim & Becking, 1996). …”

Section: The Concept Of Basic Gesturementioning

confidence: 99%

Basic Gestures as Spatiotemporal Reference Frames for Repetitive Dance/Music Patterns in Samba and Charleston

Naveda

2010

Music Perception

Music Perception vo lu m e 28, issue 1, pp. 71-91, issn 0730-7829, electronic issn 1533-8312 © 2010 by t h e regents o f t h e university o f california. all rights reserved. please d i r e c t all requests f o r permission to p h oto c o p y o r r e p ro d u c e a rt i c l e c o n t e n t t h ro u g h t h e university o f california press's rights a n d permissions w e b s i t e , h t t p ://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi:10.1525/mp.2010.28.1.71 Basic Gestures As Spatiotemporal Reference Frames 71marc leman & luiz naveda Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium the goal of the present study is to gain better insight into how dancers establish, through dancing, a spatiotemporal reference frame in synchrony with musical cues. With the aim of achieving this, repetitive dance patterns of samba and Charleston were recorded using a three-dimensional motion capture system. Geometric patterns then were extracted from each joint of the dancer's body. The method uses a body-centered reference frame and decomposes the movement into nonorthogonal periodicities that match periods of the musical meter. Musical cues (such as meter and loudness) as well as action-based cues (such as velocity) can be projected onto the patterns, thus providing spatiotemporal reference frames, or 'basic gestures,' for action-perception couplings. Conceptually speaking, the spatiotemporal reference frames control minimum effort points in action-perception couplings. They reside as memory patterns in the mental and/or motor domains, ready to be dynamically transformed in dance movements. The present study raises a number of hypotheses related to spatial cognition that may serve as guiding principles for future dance/music studies.

A Cross-modal Heuristic for Periodic Pattern Analysis of Samba Music and Dance

Naveda

Journal of New Music Research

2009

Samba delimits a privileged cultural territory, which is populated by a diverse set of dance and musical expressions. Although several authors have stressed the fact that music and dance are intrinsically coupled in samba culture, there is a lack of proper methods that allow the description of this relationship in terms of musical patterns and body movement. In this study, we develop a method to unravel this relationship, using a computational heuristics that provides an analysis framework to find periodic patterns connected with metre in dance and music. The method is applied to a limited universe of samba dances and music, which is used to illustrate the usefulness of the approach. In particular, we show that an interesting coupling can be observed between dance and music at the metrical level. The results allow us to make the description of shared structures, such as synchronized patterns and spatial gestures, under the common framework of metre. Evidence for the enactment hypothesis is revealed by the contrast between binary tendencies in dance patterns and polymetric ambiguity in music. It is likely that the musical ambiguity of samba forms is a basis for the active engagement of dancers in re-enactment processes, thus providing a framework for embodied meaningformation