Is He Playing Solo or within an Ensemble? How the Context, Visual Information, and Expertise May Impact upon the Perception of Musical Expressivity

Abstract

Visual information is imperative when developing a concrete and context-sensitive understanding of how music performance is perceived. Recent studies highlight natural, automatic, and nonconscious dependence on visual cues that ultimately refer to body expressions observed in the musician. The current study investigated how the social context of a performing musician (eg playing alone or within an ensemble) and the musical expertise of the perceivers influence the strategies used to understand and decode the visual features of music performance. Results revealed that both perceiver groups, nonmusicians and musicians, have a higher sensitivity towards gaze information; therefore, an impoverished stimulus such as a point-light display is insufficient to understand the social context in which the musician is performing. Implications for these findings are discussed.

Music for anxiety? Meta-analysis of anxiety reduction in non-clinical samples

“…The complex nature of such interventions may involve: (1) engagement with music (dancing, singing) to boost subjective well-being (Weinberg & Joseph, 2016); (2) mental imagery to project positively in future (Pictet, Jermann, & Ceschi, 2016); (3) playing a musical instrument to express the personality (Nadyrova, 2012), discover hidden feelings (e.g., while improvising), and to show emotions that may be difficult to express verbally (C. Labbé, Glowinski, & Grandjean, 2016). Moreover, new technological developments allow non-musicians to produce music through corporal expression (by moving) while using interactive multimodal applications (Glowinski et al, 2014). The impact of those movements on emotions has not been explored yet.…”

The Power of Gaze in Music. Leonard Bernstein’s Conducting Eyes

“…In the last 30 years, they have investigated the functions of movements in performance [22,23], sometimes focusing on the meanings of performers' movements [24][25][26], and how they influence the perception and the subjective experience of music [1][2][3]6,27], for instance, assessing the performer's gaze direction and other cues such as nodding, self-touch, stance width, step size, resolute impression in the first minute after stage entrance [28] and their effects on the audience's first impression. Other works focus on the reciprocal body communication between co-performers, such as progressive coordination, synchronization, and time lag reduction achieved through gestures and glances in duo pianists [4,29,30] and through head and gaze direction in quartets [31]. Concerning communication in ensembles, [32], through automated motion detection, shows how both head and gaze direction and head ancillary movements of a group of players spontaneously change when changing the way they interact with the rest of the orchestra and when they see the conductor.…”

“…On the other side of the stage, [31] found that for both non-musicians and musicians, gaze information helps to perceive musical expressivity. The study in [41] used eye-tracking to analyze the audience's gaze during a multipart female duo musical performance, finding that the melody part significantly attracted more visual attention than the accompaniment one; moreover, joint attention phenomena emerged as the singers shifted their gazes toward their co-performers, and melody or accompaniment strongly influenced the total duration of gazes within the audience.…”

Basis-Function Modeling of Loudness Variations in Ensemble Performance

“…Research on expression in ensemble performance is sparse. Studies in this area often focus on synchronization between musicians [13], [14], and the cues musicians use to communicate and synchronize [15], [16].…”