Distributed Musical Rehearsal

International audienceBringing together a group of musicians and a conductor for a musical rehearsal requires advance planning and an important budget in order to cover travel and subsidiary costs. We have developed an ATM based telepresence environment allowing small groups of musicians that are located in different sites to rehearse as if they were present in the same room and have organized a first distributed musical rehearsal trial. The trial allowed us to test and evaluate the system, according to a methodology we developed and to draw first conclusions regarding its performance and usability

Rehearsal Injuries in Soft-Soled Character Shoes: Injury Rate of Female Collegiate Dancers Wearing Soft-Soled Character Shoes with 2.5 or 3.0 Inch Heels in Musical Theatre Rehearsals

High-heeled shoes (HHS) have been known to present biomechanical imbalances in lower-leg mechanics at the pedestrian level, but have not been thoroughly studied in the context of highly dynamic movement, such as dance. In order to analyze the effects of 2.5-inch and 3.0-inch soft-soled character shoes (CS) worn by female collegiate musical theatre dancers during rehearsals, selected subjects completed a written questionnaire, the star balance excursion test, and a heel raise test. It was predicted that both heel heights would promote irregularities in subjects’ sense of balance and lower leg stamina, while 3.0 inch CS would cause greater rates of injury overall. The resulting data showed that while there was no difference in the number of reported injuries among subjects wearing either 2.5-inch CS or 3.0-inch CS during rehearsals, there was less range of motion (RoM) and stability observed in 3.0-inch CS. The median number of heel rises from the heel raise test was approximately 10, showing a wide range of strength and stamina among subjects individually. Additionally, only 35% of subjects reported warming up in CS before rehearsals, and 13% reported cooling down after dancing in rehearsal. These results indicate a great need for supplemental strengthening for dancers, as well as the development of a comprehensive warm-up and cool-down aiming to prepare dancers to effectively wear CS for extended periods of time and continue to counter potential injury

Social decision-making driven by artistic explore-exploit tension

We studied social decision-making in the rule-based improvisational dance $There$ $Might$ $Be$ $Others$, where dancers make in-the-moment compositional choices. Rehearsals provided a natural test-bed with communication restricted to non-verbal cues. We observed a key artistic explore-exploit tension in which the dancers switched between exploitation of existing artistic opportunities and riskier exploration of new ones. We investigated how the rules influenced the dynamics using rehearsals together with a model generalized from evolutionary dynamics. We tuned the rules to heighten the tension and modeled nonlinear fitness and feedback dynamics for mutation rate to capture the observed temporal phasing of the dancers' exploration-versus-exploitation. Using bifurcation analysis, we identified key controls of the tension and showed how they could shape the decision-making dynamics of the model much like turning a "dial" in the instructions to the dancers could shape the dance. The investigation became an integral part of the development of the dance

Moving in time: simulating how neural circuits enable rhythmic enactment of planned sequences

Many complex actions are mentally pre-composed as plans that specify orderings of simpler actions. To be executed accurately, planned orderings must become active in working memory, and then enacted one-by-one until the sequence is complete. Examples include writing, typing, and speaking. In cases where the planned complex action is musical in nature (e.g. a choreographed dance or a piano melody), it appears to be possible to deploy two learned sequences at the same time, one composed from actions and a second composed from the time intervals between actions. Despite this added complexity, humans readily learn and perform rhythm-based action sequences. Notably, people can learn action sequences and rhythmic sequences separately, and then combine them with little trouble (Ullén & Bengtsson 2003). Related functional MRI data suggest that there are distinct neural regions responsible for the two different sequence types (Bengtsson et al. 2004). Although research on musical rhythm is extensive, few computational models exist to extend and inform our understanding of its neural bases. To that end, this article introduces the TAMSIN (Timing And Motor System Integration Network) model, a systems-level neural network model capable of performing arbitrary item sequences in accord with any rhythmic pattern that can be represented as a sequence of integer multiples of a base interval. In TAMSIN, two Competitive Queuing (CQ) modules operate in parallel. One represents and controls item order (the ORD module) and the second represents and controls the sequence of inter-onset-intervals (IOIs) that define a rhythmic pattern (RHY module). Further circuitry helps these modules coordinate their signal processing to enable performative output consistent with a desired beat and tempo.Accepted manuscrip

The UK’s first professional symphony orchestra cooperative: social enterprise?

This conference paper reports the results of the first phase of a three phase longitudinal research study designed to examine the initiation and development of the UK‟s first professional symphony orchestra cooperative. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with thirty six professional musicians from a "pool" of forty plus musicians. This "pool" of musicians provides the cooperative with a resource that can be drawn on to form an orchestra to rehearse for and perform concerts and recordings. Preliminary results reveal four themes that emerged from the semi-structured interview data. These themes were interpreted by the researchers as: "commitment", "democracy", "social mission" and "aesthetic aspirations". The themes are presented along with supporting quotations from the interview data that illustrate the characteristics of these four emergent themes. The implications of the themes are then discussed within the context of the prior literature reviewe