Listeners’ Bodies in Music Analysis: Gestures, Motor Intentionality, and Models

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’s Vampyrotheone, Elliott Carter’s ASKO Concerto, and Thomas Adès’s Living Toys—in which motion-capture studies revealed the different roles of listeners’ gestures in organizing musical experience

Effort in gestural interactions with imaginary objects in Hindustani Dhrupad vocal music

Physical effort has often been regarded as a key factor of expressivity in music performance. Nevertheless, systematic experimental approaches to the subject have been rare. In North Indian classical (Hindustani) vocal music, singers often engage with melodic ideas during improvisation by manipulating intangible, imaginary objects with their hands, such as through stretching, pulling, pushing, throwing etc. The above observation suggests that some patterns of change in acoustic features allude to interactions that real objects through their physical properties can afford. The present study reports on the exploration of the relationships between movement and sound by accounting for the physical effort that such interactions require in the Dhrupad genre of Hindustani vocal improvisation. The work follows a mixed methodological approach, combining qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse interviews, audio-visual material and movement data. Findings indicate that despite the flexibility in the way a Dhrupad vocalist might use his/her hands while singing, there is a certain degree of consistency by which performers associate effort levels with melody and types of gestural interactions with imaginary objects. However, different schemes of cross-modal associations are revealed for the vocalists analysed, that depend on the pitch space organisation of each particular melodic mode (rāga), the mechanical requirements of voice production, the macro-structure of the ālāp improvisation and morphological cross-domain analogies. Results further suggest that a good part of the variance in both physical effort and gesture type can be explained through a small set of sound and movement features. Based on the findings, I argue that gesturing in Dhrupad singing is guided by: the know-how of humans in interacting with and exerting effort on real objects of the environment, the movement–sound relationships transmitted from teacher to student in the oral music training context and the mechanical demands of vocalisation

Music Sounds Better With You

Electronic Dance Music (EDM) is a catalyst for creative expression, from the solo dance form known as shuffling, to “Flow Arts” activities (forms of self-expression inducing a flow state) like poi, hula hooping, orbiting, and gloving. Gloving is a subcultural practice and artform that couples LED lights with dexterous finger movements. It is a method of expression for dance music enthusiasts (also known as ravers) and has become an important component of the EDM scene, particularly over the past decade. Glovers engage in “secondary” performances to live music (DJs) using complex techniques such as symbolism, word painting, and what the community refers to as “musicianship.” Performances are comprised mainly of improvisatory gestures and movements drawn from a large lexicon, known collectively as “concepts.” Learning the skill of gloving involves taking part in oral transmission, cyphering, community building activities (both online and in-person), and cultivating a gloving identity with an accompanying pseudonym. This monograph illuminates the lacuna in the discourse regarding the lack of attention given to Canadian rave culture within the field of Electronic Dance Music Culture (EDMC). It elucidates primarily the practices of gloving within the Toronto rave scene. Toronto has played an integral role in the history of gloving from its earliest roots in “liquiding,” a style of dance that originated at raves during the 1990s. Several glovers and liquid dancers active in the Toronto rave scene between 1990 and 2020 are informants for the work. The work’s methodologies draw from existing practices, pulling from several fields including musicology, sociology, and ethnography. The work itself takes the form of an autoethnographic study, rooted in the participatory approaches of journalists Hunter S. Thompson and Simon Reynolds. The format is unconventional, embracing casual language, audio-visual materials, participant observation methodology, fieldnotes and meta-reflections, interviews, and pictures, presented in a mosaic approach à la Marshall McLuhan. The work also lacks a traditional critique, preferring to infer through storytelling and descriptions by informants from within the scene itself. The author of the work offers a robust critique of the theoretical idealization of fieldwork in EDMC scholarship by purposefully utilizing fluid positionality as a defining quality. The overarching arguments are threefold and include advocating for the acknowledgment of Toronto as a city of importance in the global rave scene, Flow Arts as a pathway to self-actualization, and calling to action the implementation of “Fluid Positionality” as an optimal way to negotiate “the vibe” for more nuanced data collection

A Statistical Approach to Analyzing Sound Tracings

This paper presents an experiment on sound tracing, meaning an experiment on how people relate motion to sound. 38 participants were presented with 18 short sounds, and instructed to move their hands in the air while acting as though the sound was created by their hand motion. The hand motion of the participants was recorded, and has been analyzed using statistical tests, comparing results between different sounds, between different subjects, and between different sound classes. We have identified several relationships between sound and motion which are present in the majority of the subjects. A clear distinction was found in onset acceleration for motion to sounds with an impulsive dynamic envelope compared to non-impulsive sounds. Furthermore, vertical movement has been shown to be related to sound frequency, both in terms of spectral centroid and pitch. Moreover, a significantly higher amount of overall acceleration was observed for non-pitched sounds as compared to pitched sounds. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012, Volume 7172/2012, 120-145