Musical Expectancy in Squat Sonification for People Who Struggle with Physical Activity

Abstract

Physical activity is important for a healthy lifestyle. However, it can be hard to stay engaged with exercise and this can often lead to avoidance. Sonification has been used to support physical activity through the optimisation/correction of movement. Though previous work has shown how sonification can improve movement execution and motivation, the specific mechanisms of motivation have yet to be investigated in the context of challenging exercises. We investigate the role of music expectancy as a way to leverage people’s implicit and embodied understanding of music within move- ment sonification to provide information on technique while also motivating continuation of movement and rewarding its completion. The paper presents two studies showing how this musically-informed sonification can be used to support the squat movement. The results show how musical expectancy impacted people’s perception of their own movement, in terms of reward, motivation and movement behaviour and the way in which they moved.

A Review on the Relationship Between Sound and Movement in Sports and Rehabilitation

“…The potential use of real-time movement sonification has motivated researchers to investigate the effectiveness of sonification as additional real-time acoustic information in sport training to enhance athletic performance in a wide range of sports (see Supplementary Table 1 ), including: running (Eriksson and Bresin, 2010; Bolíbar and Bresin, 2012; Boyd and Godbout, 2012; Sanderson and Hunt, 2016), aerobics (Hermann and Zehe, 2011), rowing (Dubus and Bresin, 2010; Schaffert and Mattes, 2011; Wolf et al, 2011; Cesarini et al, 2014b), swimming (Hermann et al, 2012; Cesarini et al, 2014a), sailing (Tarnas and Schaffert, 2017), cycling (Sigrist et al, 2016; Schaffert et al, 2017), speed skating (Godbout and Boyd, 2010; Stienstra et al, 2011; Boyd et al, 2012; Godbout et al, 2014), skiing (Kirby, 2009; Hasegawa et al, 2012), golf (Kleiman-Weiner and Berger, 2006; Nylander et al, 2014), juggling (Bovermann et al, 2007), German wheel (Hummel et al, 2010), squat jumps (Newbold et al, 2017), motorsport (Powell and Lumsden, 2015), recreational sports (Barrass et al, 2010), postural control (Avissar et al, 2013), slackline (Anlauff et al, 2013), handball (Höner et al, 2004), basketball (Ramezanzade et al, 2014), elastic trampoline (Pugliese and Takala, 2015), and manual wheelchair training and operation (Almqvist Gref et al, 2016).…”

Movement sonification expectancy model: leveraging musical expectancy theory to create movement-altering sonifications

“…Newbold et al show how people are encouraged to move further when their expectation is defied and feel a sense of completion when their expectation is met [4,30]. These works all demonstrate how these musical constructs can be used within sonification to alter one's perception of one's own movement.…”

“…This section describes a study to explore how musical expectancy-based sonifications impact people's movement behaviour and is used to evaluate and extend the MoSEM presented above. While previous works have explored how musical expectation may be used within movement sonification [4,17,30], it has yet to be examined in relation to how one's expectation of one's own movement is impacted by it. For the purposes of the study, we consider a single movement, raising and lowering an arm, and define "open" and "closed" versions of it.…”

“…The aim was to test the hypothesis that the perceptual cues available to an individual at the target point of a movement change the way the musical stability in the sonifications impacts their movement. We adopt a musical expectancy-based design for the sonification (like that used in [4,30]) and measure the impact the sound has on movement in the presence or otherwise of visual cues. A video demo of the sonification can be found [link removed for review-see additional files]…”

“…This work demonstrates the need to consider people's perception of sound (and music) in the design of sonifications and the need to consider non-sonification based cues. It also highlights musical expectation as a useful tool for use in sonification, which can be used to alter people's perception of movement, useful in exercise [30], rehabilitation [4,17] and motor learning [5], and through which sonifications can be designed not only to inform but to encourage as well. Future work in this area should explore how the MoSEM may be applied to these different areas, and how in turn the MoSEM can be expanded to consider not only extra-modal cues but perhaps also internal barriers such as self-belief or confidence in a movement [14] and how the MoSEM itself can be used to design effective sonifications.…”