Novel Methods in Facilitating Audience and Performer Interaction Using the Mood Conductor Framework

While listeners’ emotional response to music is the subject of numerous studies, less attention is paid to the dynamic emotion variations due to the interaction between artists and audiences in live improvised music performances. By opening a direct communication channel from audience members to performers, the Mood Conductor system provides an experimental framework to study this phenomenon. Mood Conductor facilitates interactive performances and thus also has an inherent entertainment value. The framework allows audience members to send emotional directions using their mobile devices in order to “conduct” improvised performances. Emotion coordinates indicted by the audience in the arousal-valence space are aggregated and clustered to create a video projection. This is used by the musicians as guidance, and provides visual feedback to the audience. Three different systems were developed and tested within our framework so far. These systems were trialled in several public performances with different ensembles. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrated that musicians and audiences were highly engaged with the system, and raised new insights enabling future improvements of the framework

A Participatory Live Music Performance with the Open Symphony System

Our Open Symphony system reimagines the music experience for a digital age, fostering alliances between performer and audience and our digital selves. Open Symphony enables live participatory music performance where the audience actively engages in the music creation process. This is made possible by using stateof- the-art web technologies and data visualisation techniques. Through collaborations with local performers we will conduct a series of interactive music performance revolutionizing the performance experience both for performers and audiences. The system throws open music-creating possibilities to every participant and is a genuine novel way to demonstrate the field of Human Computer Interaction through computer-supported cooperative creation and multimodal music and visual perception

Open Symphony: Creative Participation for Audiences of Live Music Performances

This work is partly supported by the FAST-IMPACt EPSRC project (EP/L019981/1), the Centre for Digital Music EPSRC Platform Grant (EP/E045235/1), the EU H2020 Audio Commons project (688382), QMUL's Centre for Public Engagement, the China Scholarship Council, and Arts Council England (Sound and Music Organisation Audience Labs)

Jamming with a Smart Mandolin and Freesound-based Accompaniment

This paper presents an Internet of Musical Things ecosystem involving musicians and audiences interacting with a smart mandolin, smartphones, and the Audio Commons online repository Freesound. The ecosystem has been devised to sup- port performer-instrument and performer-audience interactions through the generation of musical accompaniments exploiting crowd-sourced sounds. We present two use cases investigating how audio content retrieved from Freesound can be leveraged by performers or audiences to produce accompanying soundtracks for music performance with a smart mandolin. In the performer- instrument interaction use case, the performer can select content to be retrieved prior to performing through a set of keywords and structure it in order to create the desired accompaniment. In the performer-audience interaction use case, a group of audience members participates in the music creation by selecting and arranging Freesound audio content to create an accompaniment collaboratively. We discuss the advantages and limitations of the system with regard to music making and audience participation, along with its implications and challenges

Visual cues in musical synchronisation

Although music performance is generally thought of as an auditory activity in the Western tradition, the presence of continuous visual information in live music contributes to the cohesiveness of music ensembles, which presents an interesting psychological phenomenon in which audio and visual cues are presumably integrated. In order to investigate how auditory and visual sensory information are combined in the basic process of synchronising movements with music, this thesis focuses on both musicians and nonmusicians as they respond to two sources of visual information common to ensembles: the conductor, and the ancillary movements (movements that do not directly create sound; e.g. body sway or head nods) of co-performers. These visual cues were hypothesized to improve the timing of intentional synchronous action (matching a musical pulse), as well as increasing the synchrony of emergent ancillary movements between participant and stimulus. The visual cues were tested in controlled renderings of ensemble music arrangements, and were derived from real, biological motion. All three experiments employed the same basic synchronisation task: participants drummed along to the pulse of tempo-changing music while observing various visual cues. For each experiment, participants’ drum timing and upper-body movements were recorded as they completed the synchronisation task. The analyses used to quantify drum timing and ancillary movements came from theoretical approaches to movement timing and entrainment: information processing and dynamical systems. Overall, this thesis shows that basic musical timing is a common ability that is facilitated by visual cues in certain contexts, and that emergent ancillary movements and intentional synchronous movements in combination may best explain musical timing and synchronisation

Examining Emotion Perception Agreement in Live Music Performance

Current music emotion recognition (MER) systems rely on emotion data averaged across listeners and over time to infer the emotion expressed by a musical piece, often neglecting time- and listener-dependent factors. These limitations can restrict the efficacy of MER systems and cause misjudgements. In a live music concert setting, fifteen audience members annotated perceived emotion in valence-arousal space over time using a mobile application. Analyses of inter-rater reliability yielded widely varying levels of agreement in the perceived emotions. A follow-up lab study to uncover the reasons for such variability was conducted, where twenty-one listeners annotated their perceived emotions through a recording of the original performance and offered open-ended explanations. Thematic analysis reveals many salient features and interpretations that can describe the cognitive processes. Some of the results confirm known findings of music perception and MER studies. Novel findings highlight the importance of less frequently discussed musical attributes, such as musical structure, performer expression, and stage setting, as perceived across different modalities. Musicians are found to attribute emotion change to musical harmony, structure, and performance technique more than non-musicians. We suggest that listener-informed musical features can benefit MER in addressing emotional perception variability by providing reasons for listener similarities and idiosyncrasies

Transforming Performance : An inquiry into the emotional processes of a classical pianist

This artistic research PhD project challenges classical music performance culture through a series of experimental collaborative projects. My particular interest lies in how this culture shapes the psychological experience of performance from the perspective of the individual musician. The project’s aims can be further defined through the following research questions: a) How can I better understand the psychological impact that the traditions and ceremonies of classical music have on my performance? b) Departing from my own practice, what other factors affect me emotionally during performance? c) How can experimentation with the traditions of performance culture in classical music provide different modes of emotional regulation in staged performance? This thesis is a compilation of projects and publications in which I explore classical music performance through my individual experience as a soloist. Selected concert performances of classical works, experimentation with performance settings, and the creation of two commissioned works, play central roles. The method and design builds on the qualitative study of several case studies of my practice as a concert pianist in collaboration with other musicians, choreographers and composers. The methodological approach entails combinations of autoethnographic methods, stimulated recall and thematic analysis. The theoretical framework is twofold, and rests on psychological and psychoanalytical perspectives as well as on a socio-historically driven analysis of the music-theoretical concept of Werktreue. Some artistic results are available online in The Research Catalogue and others are published on the CD Notes from Endenich (Daphne Records). The combined outcomes of the project suggest, that musicians can benefit from an increased awareness of factors that affect the western classical music performer. While this thesis is specifically directed towards other musicians, it is also my hope that the findings can be valuable also in other research fields. Without the active contribution from musicians and artists into the investigation of how they function as performers, and of the values that accompany them on-stage, it is difficult to understand which needs should be addressed scientifically. For music researchers, there are many opportunities to dig into the different aspects of performance, but it is vital to let musicians show the way by collaborating within the field of Artistic Research, and thereby, together with musicians, find new ways to transform their experience of performing

Conceptualizing Psychological Performance Enhancement in a Music Domain

Contrary to sport, the study of performance enhancement in music is at an earlier stage of development in its research, practice, and performer acceptance (Pecen, Collins, & MacNamara, 2016). In the absence of music performance enhancement research, practitioners frequently utilize sport as a template to inform both research and applied practice with musicians to optimize performance (Hays, 2002, 2012). While sport provides an evidence-based framework for studying performance enhancement, musicians have unique performance considerations that differ from athletes (Pecen et al., 2016), and these divergences in domains are not well understood. Using the McLeroy framework (McLeroy, Bibeau, Steckler, & Glanz, 1988), the purpose of this research was to conceptualize psychological performance enhancement (PPE) in a music domain. This purpose was achieved by way of two studies as part of a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2011). Study 1 (N = 459) used descriptive surveys to identify musicians’ psychosocial responses to performance, the psychological skills and strategies that musicians use during practice/rehearsal and performance, and the professionals specialized in performance enhancement with whom musicians have worked. Building upon study 1, study 2 (N = 12) utilized interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA; Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009) to deeply explore musicians’ lived experiences of psychological performance enhancement. The results from descriptive and inferential statistical analyses revealed that the psychological skills musicians employ may not appropriately address their psychosocial responses to performance. Furthermore, musicians’ performance needs are limited by the psychological skills training (PST) model of practice (Hardy, Jones, & Gould, 1996), as musicians seem to benefit from more mindfulness and acceptance-based models of performance enhancement (Gardner & Moore, 2007) that consider the well-being of the total performer and the environmental context. Results from the IPA demonstrated that the musicians employed a plethora of general and music-specific coping strategies to optimize performance, and also discussed various health and wellness behaviors, the influence that “others” play in the performance process (e.g., instructors, family), the influence of the external environment (e.g., acoustics, audience), the role of the music community (e.g., supportive behaviors, unsupportive behaviors), as well as the perceived access to and utilization of support systems as they relate to PPE. Musicians also considered seeking a performance psychology professional, preferably one with a background in music performance, so long as an individualized person-centered approach was utilized. Results support a systems-based approach to evaluating PPE in a music domain. Recommendations for musicians, educators/instructors, and performance psychology professionals are discussed, in addition to concerns related to musicians’ access to psychological performance enhancement services