Walking on music

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Sharing musical expression through embodied listening: a case study based on Chinese guqin music

In this study we report on the result of an experiment in which a guqin music performance was recorded and individual listeners were asked to move their arm along with the music that they heard. Movement velocity patterns were extracted from both the musician and the listeners. The analysis reveals that the listeners’ movement velocity patterns tend to correlate with each other, and with the movement velocity patterns of the player’s shoulders.The findings support the hypothesis that listeners and player share, to a certain degree, a sensitivity for musical expression and its associated corporeal intentionality

Pitch and tempo precision in the reproduction of familiar songs

In this article we report evidence that memory for musical pitch and tempo might not be as absolute as stated in pre-vious studies. In an experiment 72 subjects were asked to imitate familiar songs. Analysis of the recordings revealed that participants did not imitate the pitch of the original songs correctly, rather a random distribution within the octave was found. Also for the imitation of the tempo, the precision is clearly poorer than what has been found in previous studies. Therefore we suggest that people do not generally possess an absolute memory for musical pitch and tempo. Rather, they imitate songs starting with a pitch that assures them a comfortable singing range. The ‘im-age ’ of a song seems to be preserved regardless of the pitch and over a broad range of tempi