Listeners’ Bodies in Music Analysis

Abstract

In this article I demonstrate how listeners understand musical processes with their bodies, and how their gestures can be used to build analytical models. Specifically, I draw on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue that situated, active listeners project their motor intentional gestures inside music, where they reconstitute the very nature of musical space and its objects according to their own unique perspective. Rather than passively reflecting gestures of performers, these listeners use their own bodily states to create the structure and meaning of music. I illustrate how those states can be mobilized for analysis by taking quantifiable features of gestures—acceleration and temporal profiles—as models of musical structure, and by using those models as a basis for analytical narratives. I focus on three pieces—Olga Neuwirth’sVampyrotheone, Elliott Carter’sASKO Concerto, and Thomas Adès’sLiving Toys—in which motion-capture studies revealed the different roles of listeners’ gestures in organizing musical experience.

"Guitar Thinking" and "Genre Thinking" among an Online Community of Guitarists

“…To an extent, I believe this study's focus on physical gesture addresses Ewell's former concern. Specifically, by taking a process-based rather than an object-based (Kozak 2015) perspective on musical organization, I attempt to side-step any encoding dogma that potentially dictates what popular music "should" sound like. Ohriner (2016) summarizes this issue well, arguing that:…”

Embodiment, sound and visualization: A multimodal perspective in music education

“…Recently, the integration of action-based activities and the process of visualization as an instrument for enriching and making the learning process more creative have been assessed. One of the projects which is moving in this direction is the Music Paint Machine, an interactive music system that allows musicians to make a digital painting by playing music and by moving on a coloured mat (Nijs & Leman 2014, 2015. MIROR-Body gesture (Volpi, Vanni Addessi & Mazzarino 2012, Vanni, Volpe, Segaleo, Mancini & Lepre 2013), is an interactive, reflexive music system in which the perception of the sound produced by the system is a virtual copy of the child's movements (Addessi, Maffioli & Anelli 2015).…”

“…By the analysis of the arm movements of listeners it was found that there is a correlation with the velocity of the movement of the player's shoulders, sharing the same corporeal intentionality (Leman et al 2009); Phillips-Silver & Trainor (2005,2007) on the other hand, demonstrated an early cross-modal interaction between body movement and auditory encoding of musical rhythms in infants and adults; Eerola, Luck & Toiviainen (2006) investigated pre-schoolers' corporeal synchronization with music. Kozak (2015) argues that the movement of the listener's body through space and time can represent a model for the way they process music.…”

Gestural Perspectives on Popular-Music Performance

“…[1.4] Fundamental to the study of gesture in music performance is the notion of understanding not as an object-oriented knowledge, but as a knowledge that is an active, real-time, process. Kozak (2015) approaches this distinction by writing that music theory is shifting "a ention of analysis from the finished musical 'object' to the emerging process of performance" ( [1.2]). A as (2015) similarly considers the real-time processes of musical understanding with specific regard to form and formal functions such as meter and metric projection (275).…”