Eric Clarke

• University of Oxford

Empirical research into large ensemble performance has crossed many disciplinary boundaries from music education to management studies, and has included the investigation of musicians’ interpersonal coordination and communication, group creativity and decision-making, conductors’ gestures, group musical expression, the social organization of large...

The nineteenth century saw a number of significant changes in European musical culture, including changes in the size and nature of the orchestra and the rise of the modern conductor. The coordination and musical leadership of orchestras has taken a variety of forms historically, but from around the middle of the nineteenth century silent conductin...

Where is the academic study of music today, and what paths should it take into the future? Should we be looking at how music relates to society and constructs meaning through it, rather than how it transcends the social? Can we ‘remix’ our discipline and attempt to address all musics on an equal basis, without splitting ourselves in advance into su...

There is a very long history of writing about the moving effects of literature, art, and music. Being moved has consistently been one of the most frequently reported feelings by listeners when describing strong, emotional experiences with music (Gabrielsson, 2011). Surprisingly however, despite its prevalence in everyday life, the feeling of being...

One of the most immediate and overt ways in which people respond to music is by moving their bodies to the beat. However, the extent to which the rhythmic complexity of groove-specifically its syncopation-contributes to how people spontaneously move to music is largely unexplored. Here, we measured free movements in hand and torso while participant...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that – like other synchronized, collective actions – making music together with others fosters affiliation and pro-social behaviour. However, it is not yet known whether these effects are limited to active, interpersonal musical participation, or whether solitary music listening can also produce similar effects. T...

An exploratory empirical analysis was conducted to investigate the little-studied, albeit ubiquitous, phenomenon of ‘being moved’ by music. Using an online questionnaire, 138 participants listened to experimenter-selected and self-selected moving music. Thematic content analysis of participants’ free descriptions suggests that the feeling of ‘being...

Previous research has shown that—compared with audio-only presentations—the audiovisual presentation of a musical performance consistently enhances observers’ appreciation. Furthermore, it has been hypothesized that observation of a musical performance through multiple channels—auditory and visual—may result in a heightened emotional response due t...

AND Spence (2014) demonstrated that visual kinematic performance cues may be more important than auditory performance cues in terms of observers' ratings of expressivity perceived in audiovisual excerpts of piano playing, and that visual kinematic performance cues had crossmodal effects on the perception of auditory expressivity. The present study...

This article documents and analyses a creative collaboration between the composer Jeremy Thurlow and the violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved in the production of Ouija, a work for solo violin and laptop computer. The article situates the account of this creative process within recent literature on distributed and collaborative creativity, and focuses...

In the age of the Internet and with the dramatic proliferation of mobile listening technologies, music has unprecedented global distribution and embeddedness in people's lives. It is a source of intense experiences of both the most intimate and solitary, and public and collective, kinds - from an individual with their smartphone and headphones, to...

IN MUSIC, THE RHYTHMS OF DIFFERENT INSTRUMENTS are often syncopated against each other to create tension. Existing perceptual theories of syncopation cannot adequately model such kinds of syncopation since they assume monophony. This study investigates the effects of polyphonic context, instrumentation and metrical location on the salience of synco...

“Strong experiences of music”—to use Alf Gabrielsson’s (2011) term—commonly, but apparently paradoxically, seem to involve people in both losing themselves and finding themselves in music. How can this be? Who or what is lost, and, equally, who or what is found, and how can they both happen together? In this paper I offer an approach to these quest...

What does it mean to be expressive in music performance in diverse historical and cultural domains? What are the means at the disposal of a performer in various time periods and musical practice conventions? And what are the conceptualizations of expression and the roles of performers that shape expressive performance? For the first time, a wide va...

Moving to music is an essential human pleasure particularly related to musical groove. Structurally, music associated with groove is often characterised by rhythmic complexity in the form of syncopation, frequently observed in musical styles such as funk, hip-hop and electronic dance music. Structural complexity has been related to positive affect...

In musical performance, bodily gestures play an important role in communicating expressive intentions to audiences. Although previous studies have demonstrated that visual information can have an effect on the perceived expressivity of musical performances, the investigation of audiovisual interactions has been held back by the technical difficulti...

If there is a topic on which the humanities might make a distinctive claim, it is that of consciousness - an essential aspect of human being. And within the humanities, music might make its own claims in relation to both consciousness and being human. To investigate this connection, David Clarke and Eric Clarke brought together a wide variety of co...

This essay addresses distributed creative processes in the preparation and performance of a new musical work—Tongue of the Invisible by Liza Lim, commissioned by the Cologne-based Ensemble musikFabrik. Situating the research within a broadly ecological perspective, and in the specific context of the interface between composition, improvisation, and...

Consciousness has been described as one of the most mysterious things in the universe. Scientists, philosophers, and commentators from a whole range of disciplines can't seem to agree what it is, or why it is that the whole rich panoply of human experience seems to emerge from a lump of squishy grey matter in our heads. Most agree, though, that con...

This chapter uses ideas from James Gibson's ecological approach to perception, Gerald Edelman's distinction between primary and higher-order consciousness, and Daniel Dennett's 'multiple drafts' model, to explore the consequences for consciousness of the reciprocal relationship between musical materials and perceptual processes.

Music pervades everyday life. In so many ways, music marks and orchestrates the ways in which people experience the world together. What is it that makes people want to live their lives to the sound of music, and why do so many of our most private experiences and most public spectacles incorporate - or even depend on - music? This book uses psychol...

From the cylinder to the download, the practice of music has been radically transformed by the development of recording and playback technologies. This Companion provides a detailed overview of the transformation, encompassing both classical and popular music. Topics covered include the history of recording technology and the businesses built on it...

In her paper “Crossing Boundaries”, Judith Becker raises and discusses important points about where various boundaries between different ways of studying music might lie, how we negotiate those boundaries, and some of the frustrations that ensue in trying to get boundary-crossing work published. This response considers the increasingly heteroge...

This chapter considers some of the tools available for analyzing musical sound from acoustical and psychoacoustical perspectives. Spectrograms are shown of various different kinds of musical sound, to demonstrate the features and limitations of this type of representation. Different ways of representing the basic attributes of sound are illustrated...

The study of music is always to some extent "empirical", in that it involves testing ideas and interpretations against some kind of external reality. But in musicology, the kind of empirical approaches familiar in the social sciences have played a relatively marginal role, being generally restricted to interdisciplinary areas, such as the psycholog...

A recording represents a paradoxical perceptual source: we can either attend to the sound of the medium, or to the virtual world conveyed by it, and the work of a record producer can be understood as either a process of capturing performances or one of creating virtual worlds. This paper demonstrates that the record producer John Culshaw had clear...

Setting the Record Straight. A Material History of Classical Recording by Colin Symes. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. 384 pp, £27.95, hardback. ISBN 0819567213 - - Volume 24 Issue 1 - ERIC CLARKE

Erkki Huovinen’s “Varieties of Musicological Empiricism” provides a valuable analysis of some of the theoretical predicaments raised by pursuing an empirical musicology. But in this commentary, I argue for a less programmatic, and more pragmatic, approach to the term than he does. Empirical approaches in musicology have been around in one form or a...

Theories of musical meaning and psychological research on music have tended to treat music as a special domain, removed from the practical realities of everyday life. This book takes a different approach, tackling musical meaning from the perspective of perception, and treating meaning in terms of listeners' experiences and responses, rather than i...

This paper examines different ways in which the notion of creativity has been used in relation to performance, and discusses psychological research on the topic. A considerable amount of this research is concerned with the creative use of expression in score-based performance, but a more conspicuous demonstration of creativity in performance is fou...

The majority of studies of performance focus on the tonal and metric music of the common-practice period, studied at the moment of performance rather than over a period of rehearsal, and usually divorced from the context of real rehearsal and performance (schedules, audiences, auditoria). This paper reports part of a larger project in which three n...

In Ways of Listening, musicologist Eric Clarke explores musical meaning, music's critical function in human lives, and the relationship between listening and musical material. Clarke outlines an "ecological approach" to understanding the perception of music, arguing that the way we hear and understand music is not simply a function of our brain str...

This chapter surveys a wide range of methods that have been used in the empirical study of musical performance. Following a presentation of some of the landmarks in performance research over the past seventy years, it provides a detailed discussion of the ways in which performance attributes have been captured and measured from keyboard instruments...

This introductory chapter argues that all musicology is in some sense empirical, but that it does not always make the most of the facts available to it. Musicologists frequently work with very small amounts of data even where large data sets are available, resulting in findings that are less firmly grounded than they might be. What defines "empiric...

Over the last few decades, a growing amount of research has suggested that dyslexics have particular difficulties with skills involving accurate or rapid timing, including musical timing skills. It has been hypothesised that music training may be able to remediate such timing difficulties, and have a positive effect on fundamental perceptual skills...

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This accessible guide for students, teachers and performers at all levels unravels the complexities of musical performance and focuses on key aspects of learning, playing and responding to music. A survey of performance through the ages leads to a presentation of basic historical, analytical and psychological concepts. Four chapters follow on teach...

The relationship between music and motion has attracted interest over a broad sweep of history and across a variety of disciplines including aesthetics, psychology, music theory and neuroscience, and the relationship itself has been regarded variously as metaphorical, semiotic, and physiological. This paper argues that the relationship between musi...

emphasizes the role of performance in exemplifying structural aspects of the music through expressive gradients, discontinuities, and contrasts embeds several ingenious experimental studies within a theoretical framework that emphasizes the importance of hierarchical mental representations as a means of controlling performances (PsycINFO Database...

A number of attempts have been made in the past 10 to 15 years to construct artificial systems that can simulate human expressive performance, but few systematic studies of the relationship between model output and comparable human performances have been undertaken. In this study, we assessed listeners' responses to real and artificially generated...

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of research relating to the temporal dimension in music. It focuses primarily on small to medium-scale temporal phenomena in music, the domain that commonly referrers to as rhythm, rather than the larger-scale properties of form. The chapter has adopted a view of rhythm that sees it as the interac...

In an exploratory study of interactions between left hand (LH) and right hand (RH) fingerings, 6 professional pianists performed two Czemy studies in which LH and RH negotiate identical isochronous melodic material separated by one octave. Participants performed at sight and following rehearsal, with RH alone and hands together. Performances were r...

Musical meaning has commonly been regarded as only very distantly related to music’s acoustical surface. This paper proposes that there is actually a rather close relationship between the two—that musical meaning is specified with considerable immediacy in sound. An important aspect of the meaning of an everyday sound in the environment is its sour...

Sixteen pianists sight-read the unfingered right-hand score of 7 studies by Czerny. The pianists were of 3 levels of expertise. Each study was performed twice. Fingerings were transcribed from video recordings. Measures were taken of performance accuracy and fingering consistency. The choices made were compared to the predictions of a model based p...

Starting with the stark contrast between the power, subtlety and sophistication of performance expression and its systematic simplicity, this paper argues that the apparent contradiction can be reconciled by recognizing three important features: 1. the multi-faceted nature of the semiotics of performance; 2. the complex interaction between performa...

This paper compares timing and key-velocity data collected from a skilled performance of Schubert's G♭-major Impromptu (Opus 90) with a number of performances generated by a version of a musical expression algorithm proposed by Todd (1992). Regression analysis is used to demonstrate both the shortcomings of this model as a complete explanation of m...

The fingerings used by keyboard players are determined by a range of ergonomic (anatomic/motor), cognitive, and music-interpretive constraints. We have attempted to encapsulate the most important ergonomic constraints in a model. The model, which is presently limited to isolated melodic fragments, begins by generating all possible fingerings, limit...

Seven professional pianists were interviewed to gather their views on various aspects of piano fingering. The issues covered included technical considerations, the influence of interpretation and composers' markings on fingering, the effects of different Performance circumstances, and the role of teachers in determining fingering strategies. An ana...

The twelve essays in this volume reflect the most important trends in the study of musical performance. Three areas are investigated: the psychology of performance, the semantics of performance, and the relation between performance and analysis. The first section broaches fundamental issues such as text, expression, musical motion and the role of p...

Previously, a method of performance analysis has been described which is based on a multitimescale decomposition of the acoustic signal [Todd, ??Wavelet analysis of rhythm,?? J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 93, 2290(A) (1993)]. This analysis is sensitive to a variety of expressive devices employed by musical performers including tempo,dynamics, and articulatio...

The psychological mechanism by which even musically untutored people can comprehend novel melodies resembles that by which they comprehend sentences of their native language. The paper identifies a syntax, a semantics, and a domain or `model'. These elements are examined in application to the task of harmonic comprehension and analysis of unaccompa...

Expression in musical performance is usually accounted for in terms of a generative model that takes a structural description as input and produces expressive modifications of rhythmic structure as output. This idea is examined in two experiments. In the first, piano players try to imitate heard performances that are either real performances by ano...

Musical performance has been studied from a vareity of perspectives, but the most pervasive has been concerned with the relation between structure and expression. Research into this has tended either to be of the “analysis-by-synthesis” variety (e.g. Sundberg, 1988) or performance analysis (Shaffer, Todd and others). This paper examines the relatio...

Memory for well-known musical phrases was tested first for recognition in the absence of any specific musical context and then for recall given the preceding musical phrase as a contextual cue. Recognition and recall were found to be largely, but not completely, independent. Moreover, there was no evidence of any greater dependency between recognit...

Three experiments are described that investigate listeners' perceptions of the segmentation of a piece of atonal piano music, the location of segments extracted from the piece, and the duration and structural qualities of each segment. The experiments showed that listeners segmented the music in broad agreement with the grouping principles proposed...

This paper is concerned with the perception of small-scale timing changes in musical sequences. The control and expressive function of these have been studied quite extensively from a production perspective, but not much is known about listeners' ability to detect them. A pilot study and two experiments are reported which investigate the detectabil...

This paper examines the different motivations and aims which lie behind various attempts to investigate or make use of the relationship between language and music, some from music theory and some from the psychology of music. While the theoretical developments of linguistics and psycholinguistics have helped to develop aspects of music theory and t...

While there are increasing links between musicology and the psychology of music, the two disciplines nonetheless remain distinct in terms of their aims and hence their evaluation of different findings. This paper is concerned with the gap between formal treatments of musical structure and the approach of cognitive psychology, concentrating on the p...

The discussion started with an attempt to examine the ground common to music therapy and the psychology of music, and indicated that mutual incomprehension of concepts and methods on the part of practitioners in both areas constituted a considerable problem. The potential relevance to music therapy of some psychological findings were outlined, appr...

Music is organized hierarchically in a network of interconnected levels. Different levels demonstrate structural properties of different types, and are notated in music with differing degrees of explicitness. The lowest level consists of continuously variable expressive properties, while the middle and top levels encompass discrete canonical proper...

The metre of a piece of music can be regarded as a grammar generating the rhythmic structures of the melodies. In this role it provides the performer with a basis for coding the rhythms for performance. The present study examines a further possibility, that it can be used to control the time course of a performance through its mapping onto a time s...

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Timing data from piano performances of Gnossienne no. 5 are analyzed to examine the way in which a performer structures different subdivisions of a constant beat. The piece contains a wide variety of different beat divisions, and the timing data demonstrate that these rhythmic distinctions are accurately preserved by the performer. These data also...

The timing of notes in piano performances of ‘Vexations’ by Erik Satie was recorded by means of sensors in the piano action connected to a computer. The data were analysed so as to reassess Michon's (1974) result that rhythm and performance tempo are not independent parameters, and to examine the relationship between the performance of a piece of m...

BLDSC reference no.: D55089/85. Thesis (doctoral)--University of Exeter, 1984.