Measuring social interaction in music ensembles

Volpe, Gualtiero; D’Ausilio, Alessandro; Badino, Leonardo; Camurri, Antonio; Fadiga, Luciano

doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0377

Cited by 67 publications

(63 citation statements)

References 83 publications

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“…34), we used body sway to examine interaction at the more global level of creating a joint aesthetic expression, including factors such as synchronization, phrasing, and dynamics. Furthermore, although previous studies provided descriptions of leadership dynamics in music ensembles (20,39,46), our study experimentally manipulated leadership orthogonally to characteristics of the individual musical parts played On each trial, each performer subjectively rated the levels of goodness of performance (A and B), temporal synchronization (C and D), and ease of coordination (E and F), with five-point Likert scales, and we calculated the mean rating across the performers for each of these three aspects for each trial. To represent the group causal density (44) of body sway, we calculated the mean of the 12 GCs reflecting the pairwise influences for each trial, which reflects the overall causal interactivity sustained in a quartet.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The principles of coordination in musical ensembles are thus expected to generalize to other interaction situations. Small music ensembles are well suited to studying joint action because they act as self-managed teams, with all performers contributing to the coordination of the team (19,20).The complex, nonverbal characteristics of ensemble playing require high sensorimotor, social, and motivational engagement to achieve shared technical and aesthetic goals without explicit verbal guidance, making it a tractable problem for initial study of joint action in ecologically realistic situations. Although musical scores provide some objective guidance for coordination, performers vary tempo, phrasing, articulation, and loudness dynamically to achieve joint musical expression (21-23).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Body sway reflects leadership in joint music performance

Chang

Livingstone

Bosnyak

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

124

140

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The cultural and technological achievements of the human species depend on complex social interactions. Nonverbal interpersonal coordination, or joint action, is a crucial element of social interaction, but the dynamics of nonverbal information flow among people are not well understood. We used joint music making in string quartets, a complex, naturalistic nonverbal behavior, as a model system. Using motion capture, we recorded body sway simultaneously in four musicians, which reflected real-time interpersonal information sharing. We used Granger causality to analyze predictive relationships among the motion time series of the players to determine the magnitude and direction of information flow among the players. We experimentally manipulated which musician was the leader (followers were not informed who was leading) and whether they could see each other, to investigate how these variables affect information flow. We found that assigned leaders exerted significantly greater influence on others and were less influenced by others compared with followers. This effect was present, whether or not they could see each other, but was enhanced with visual information, indicating that visual as well as auditory information is used in musical coordination. Importantly, performers' ratings of the "goodness" of their performances were positively correlated with the overall degree of body sway coupling, indicating that communication through body sway reflects perceived performance success. These results confirm that information sharing in a nonverbal joint action task occurs through both auditory and visual cues and that the dynamics of information flow are affected by changing group relationships.leadership | joint action | music performance | body sway | Granger causality C oordinating actions with others in time and space-joint action-is essential for daily life. From opening a door for someone to conducting an orchestra, periods of attentional and physical synchrony are required to achieve a shared goal. Humans have been shaped by evolution to engage in a high level of social interaction, reflected in high perceptual sensitivity to communicative features in voices and faces, the ability to understand the thoughts and beliefs of others, sensitivity to joint attention, and the ability to coordinate goal-directed actions with others (1-3). The social importance of joint action is demonstrated in that simply moving in synchrony with another increases interpersonal affiliation, trust, and/or cooperative behavior in infants and adults (e.g., refs. 4-9). The temporal predictability of music provides an ideal framework for achieving such synchronous movement, and it has been hypothesized that musical behavior evolved and remains adaptive today because it promotes cooperative social interaction and joint action (10-12). Indeed music is used in important situations where the goal is for people to feel a social bond, such as at religious ceremonies, weddings, funerals, parties, sporting events, political rallies, and in the military...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Body sway reflects leadership in joint music performance

Chang

Livingstone

Bosnyak

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

124

140

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“…Such synchronous collective activities enhance rapport and liking between people and the feeling of being a member of a group [47,48], and may explain the ubiquity of different, synchronized social rituals across cultures. As suggested by Volpe et al [14] in this theme issue, musicians playing in ensembles are experts in non-verbal social interaction: they play in the same tempo, listen to and react to others, and occasionally find the groove. In small ensembles, all musicians have to co-regulate their performances, whereas in big orchestras, the musicians follow the conductor (leader), who, on the other hand, has to be very sensitive to both visual and acoustic cues from the orchestra.…”

Section: Behavioural Synchrony In Dyads and Ensemblesmentioning

confidence: 96%

Attending to and neglecting people: bridging neuroscience, psychology and sociology

Hari

Sams

Nummenmaa

2016

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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One contribution of 15 to a theme issue 'Attending to and neglecting people'. Human behaviour is context-dependent-based on predictions and influenced by the environment and other people. We live in a dynamic world where both the social stimuli and their context are constantly changing. Similar dynamic, natural stimuli should, in the future, be increasingly used to study social brain functions, with parallel development of appropriate signal-analysis methods. Understanding dynamic neural processes also requires accurate time-sensitive characterization of the behaviour. To go beyond the traditional stimulus-response approaches, brain activity should be recorded simultaneously from two interacting subjects to reveal why human social interaction is critically different from just reacting to each other. This theme issue on Attending to and neglecting people contains original work and review papers on person perception and social interaction. The articles cover research from neuroscience, psychology, robotics, animal interaction research and microsociology. Some of the papers are co-authored by scientists who presented their own, independent views in the recent Attention and Performance XXVI conference but were brave enough to join forces with a colleague having a different background and views. In the future, information needs to converge across disciplines to provide us a more holistic view of human behaviour, its interactive nature, as well as the temporal dynamics of our social world.

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“…Numerous studies and guidelines are available on the management of dynamics in successful choirs (Davis, 1998;Decker and Kirk, 1995;Ginsborg, et al, 2006;Guise, 2000) and Volpe, D'Ausilio, Badino, Camurri and Fadiga, 2016), have summarised analyses of a variety of small instrumental ensembles from duos to quartets from classical, popular and jazz genres.…”

Section: Small Group Dynamics and Leadershipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conductorless singing group: a particular kind of self-managed team?

Page-Shipp

Joseph

Niekerk

2018

TPM

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Purpose: Coordination of group activity is rarely more important than in a singing group that has no designated conductor. This paper aims to explore the group dynamics in an 11-man singing group whose members, all over 60, have without exception occupied senior leadership positions in their working careers. The study arose because responses to a wider research study revealed interesting perceptions of leadership issues in the group. Design/methodology/approach: All the members participated in semi-structured interviews and interpretative phenomenological analysis of the responses was used to process the responses. This enabled the identification of practices that support the group's success and illustrated how this group of practiced "leaders" respond to a (relatively) conductorless situation. Findings: It was confirmed that the group exhibits several characteristics of self-managed teams and string quartets. All members felt empowered to take a lead, although their backgrounds might have predisposed them to take such initiatives anyway. But the longserving female accompanist is, by virtue inter alia of her superior musicianship, which appears to overcome any gender bias, in many respects the de facto leader. In performance, the singers synchronize their singing in response to cues from each other, but this could work better if given more specific attention. Originality/value: Whereas conducted choirs have been extensively studied, such a selfmanaged group of amateur singers, all of whom are accustomed to leading in their working careers, has apparently not been studied. This study sheds some light on techniques for overcoming the challenges of creating quality performance in such a group and insights for similar groups, not necessarily musical, are identified.

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Measuring social interaction in music ensembles

Cited by 67 publications

References 83 publications

Body sway reflects leadership in joint music performance

Body sway reflects leadership in joint music performance

Attending to and neglecting people: bridging neuroscience, psychology and sociology

Conductorless singing group: a particular kind of self-managed team?

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