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A Theory of Musical Gesture and its Application to Beethoven and Schubert
... Musical action goes beyond physical effort. Hatten describes "effort" in music with respect to planning and action required to overcome environmental and physical forces to achieve musical intention (Hatten, 2017). Musicians must maintain careful interplay between their intention, effort, and restraint to control their technique, stay within the bounds of their instruments and bodies, and execute their intended articulation and expression (Tanaka, 2015). ...
Objective
Music strongly modulates our autonomic nervous system. This modulation is evident in musicians' beat-to-beat heart (RR) intervals, a marker of heart rate variability (HRV), and can be related to music features and structures. We present a novel approach to modeling musicians' RR interval variations, analyzing detailed components within a music piece to extract continuous music features and annotations of musicians' performance decisions.
Methods
A professional ensemble (violinist, cellist, and pianist) performs Schubert's Trio No. 2, Op. 100, Andante con moto nine times during rehearsals. RR interval series are collected from each musician using wireless ECG sensors. Linear mixed models are used to predict their RR intervals based on music features (tempo, loudness, note density), interpretive choices (Interpretation Map), and a starting factor.
Results
The models explain approximately half of the variability of the RR interval series for all musicians, with R-squared = 0.606 (violinist), 0.494 (cellist), and 0.540 (pianist). The features with the strongest predictive values were loudness, climax, moment of concern, and starting factor.
Conclusions
The method revealed the relative effects of different music features on autonomic response. For the first time, we show a strong link between an interpretation map and RR interval changes. Modeling autonomic response to music stimuli is important for developing medical and non-medical interventions. Our models can serve as a framework for estimating performers' physiological reactions using only music information that could also apply to listeners.
... En esta dirección, la pluralidad de concepciones ha dado lugar a distintas categorizaciones referidas a las tipologías del gesto musical (Sullivan, 1984;Delalande, 1988;Hatten, 2003Hatten, , 2004Hatten, , 2006Zampronha, 2005;Gritten y King, 2006;Jensenius, 2007;Peñalba, 2010;Godøy y Leman, 2010;Jensenius, Wanderley, Godøy y Leman, 2010), enfocando la problemática desde diversas perspectivas y aportando diferentes matices sobre la problemática, y por supuesto, atendiendo a sus múltiples modalidades de existencia. Sea como fuere, desde una u otra aproximación, la naturaleza semiótica del gesto implica, en sus múltiples concepciones y modalidades de existencia, una inexorable dimensión significante, participando de manera determinante en el complejo entramado de la semiosis musical, en sus diversos niveles y dimensiones. ...
En el presente artículo se discuten distintos aspectos que intervienen en los procesos de significación musical, atendiendo a las configuraciones de sentido que se entraman en el despliegue de la cognición musical corporeizada en el ámbito de la praxis interpretativa. A tales efectos, luego de una problematización general sobre dicho dominio, se aportan los resultados de una exploración sobre los modos en que estudiantes avanzados de interpretación de música académica (de los niveles de grado y posgrado universitario) conciben y relatan sus propios procesos de estudio interpretativo y despliegue performativo. En esta dirección, el foco de estudio estuvo puesto en las maneras en que los actores seleccionados piensan, organizan y experiencialmente transitan su vínculo con los discursos musicales, así como el modo en que se inscriben como intérpretes en la trama discursiva de las obras a interpretar. En este sentido, se indagaron aspectos relativos a las operaciones puestas en obra en la instancia de producción y estudio interpretativo, la manera en que acceden a diversas configuraciones significantes relativas a las obras de referencia, así como también los modos en que establecen y conciben su relación con la discursividad musical, su despliegue narrativo y su dimensión expresiva.
... Esa pluralidad de concepciones, por otra parte, ha dado lugar a distintas categorizaciones y aproximaciones respecto del gesto musical (Sullivan, 1984;Delalande, 1988;Hatten, 2003Hatten, , 2004Hatten, , 2006Zampronha, 2005;Gritten & King, 2006;Jensenius, 2007;Peñalba, 2010), enfocando la problemática desde diversas perspectivas y aportando diferentes matices sobre la problemática. El gesto, de ese modo, ha sido atendido en sus múltiples modalidades de existencia: gestos que participan de manera primaria en la producción sonora; gestos acompañantes estructurados sobre movimientos ancillares que se articulan con la corporeidad y la significación musical; gestos estéticos, expresivos o figurativos; gestos comunicativos… Frente a este panorama complejo y heterogéneo, se torna necesario establecer y profundizar las relaciones que operan entre gestualidad y corporeidad en los procesos semióticos desplegados en la semiosis musical. ...
... Here we choose this approach focusing on a specific semantic area, the body signals conveying indications of intensity-piano, forte, crescendo, diminuendo-and present two studies: in a coding study (see Poggi, 2017;Poggi & Ansani, 2016, for more details), we analyzed video-recorded fragments of orchestra and choir performance and singled out the conductors' gestures, postures, and gaze items that convey intensity indications; then we conducted a perception study on a small number of gestures of intensity. Here we do not deal with "musical gestures" in Hatten's (2006) sense, but with the "physical gestures" used by the conductor to convey indications for performance. Following our model, we define as gesture any movement produced by hands, arms, and shoulders with the goal of conveying some meaning: an emotion, a conceptual content, a mental image. ...
This work is aimed at outlining a repertoire of conductors’ gestures. In this perspective, it presents two studies that investigate a specific subset of the body signals of orchestra and choir conductors, namely, the gestures for musical intensity. First, an observational qualitative study, based on a systematic coding of a corpus of fragments from orchestra concerts and rehearsals, singled out 21 gestures, in which either the gesture as a whole or some aspects of it conveyed indications for forte, piano, crescendo, or diminuendo; some are symbolic gestures, used either with the same meaning as in everyday interaction or with one specific of conductors; others are iconic gestures, both directly or indirectly iconic. Second, in a perception study, a questionnaire submitted to 77 participants tested if 8 gestures of intensity out of the 21 singled out by the coding study are in fact shared and understood, and whether they are better interpreted by music experts than by laypeople. Results showed that the tested gestures are fairly comprehensible, not only by experts but also by non-expert participants, probably due, for some gestures, to their high level of iconicity, and for others to their closeness to everyday gestures.
... It must also be embedded in varied multimodal behavior and contextualized within specific teaching behaviors. I have argued elsewhere that teacher gestures in the vocal and instrumental music contexts be defined as spontaneous movements of teachers' hands and/or arms, accompanying either speech (McNeill, 1992) or musicmaking activities (with or without speech), and that they carry either an intention (Gritten and King, 2011), perceived meaning (Hatten, 2006), or both (Simones et al., 2015a,b). In this way, I account for teachers' essential communicative intentions in the teaching process. ...
This article considers the usefulness of the recently proposed “Teacher Behavior and Gesture (TBG) framework” for understanding the meaningfulness of teachers' hand gestures from an Enactive Cognition perspective (wherein cognition is fundamentally considered as embodied, embedded, enactive and extended). The framework is based on the main premise that gestures are part of an integral musical communicational process, fully integrated with speech and/or music-making and contextualized within specific teaching behaviors. By considering teachers' teaching behaviors, it is possible to realize teachers' pedagogical intentions. This, in turn, enables deeper understandings on teachers' gestures from the points of view of meaning, function and purpose. Application of the TBG framework across instrumental and vocal music pedagogical contexts (one-to-one, small, and large teaching groups) will bring relevant insights on developing practical scaffolding approaches, with direct implications on the quality of teaching and learning, for the benefit of both teachers and students.
... El segundo uso categoriza gestos metafóricos y se corresponden con descripciones multimodales (por ej. música en término de movimiento): (i) los gestos expresivos (Camurri, De Poli, Leman y Volpe, 2001) que transfieren información sobre las emociones; (ii) los gestos figurativos (Delalande, 1988) que comunican una "imagen" mental (nosotros interpretamos: estado mental o intención); y (iii) los gestos musicales (Hatten, 2004(Hatten, , 2006 que se refieren al modelado energético del sonido en el tiempo para ser significativamente interpretado. ...
Este trabajo evaluó la correlación entre patrones de movimiento y de música, entendidos como energía cinética y sonora, modulada por intenciones expresivo-comunicativas y descritos desde los marcos teóricos de la cognición enactiva y la expresión musical. Se discutió la pertinencia epistemológica para la selección de las categorías de análisis puente en distintos niveles de conceptualización. Se estudió una performance musical que incluye el rol de un director por su contexto de interacción musical privilegiado para analizar la expresión de significados musicales y su referencia corporeizada manifiesta. La metodología conjugó un abordaje cuantitativo basado en tecnologías de mediación y una interpretación cualitativa de los datos. Los resultados de los correlatos obtenidos fueron positivos en varias de las categorías propuestas. Estos resultados brindan una comprensión adicional sobre los modos en que se vincula la energía musical expresada en el interdominio sonoro-cinético desde la perspectiva interactiva y comunicacional dada en una performance musical.
... While in NIME we often tend to associate gesture with actual physical movement, and correspondingly the physical characteristics of a musical instrument, there is also a long tradition of describing music in terms of compositional 'musical' gestures, e.g., [20]. Hatten defines human gesture as "any energetic shaping through time that may be interpreted as significant," where significance is gauged in terms of affective, modal, or communicative meaning interpreted by an observer [21]. For the purposes of the present paper, we use the term to denote physical actions that are imbued with meaning, and given the context, we are concerned with those involved in the course of musical performance. ...
This paper introduces various ways that idiomatic gestures emerge in performance practice with new musical instruments. It demonstrates that idiomatic gestures can play an important role in the development of personalized performance practices that can be the basis for the development of style and expression. Three detailed examples-biocon-trollers, accordion-inspired instruments, and a networked intelligent controller-illustrate how a complex suite of factors throughout the design, composition and performance processes can influence the development of idiomatic gestures. We argue that the explicit consideration of idiomatic gestures throughout the life cycle of new instruments can facilitate the emergence of style and give rise to performances that can develop rich layers of meaning.
... Recent research on musical gesture finds gestural images to be integral to the perception of music (Desmet et al., 2012;Godøy & Leman, 2010;Gritten & Elaine, 2009;Henbing & Leman, 2007). The sensorimotor system makes the motor action of producing gesture and the perceptual interpretation of it into interchangeable entities (Hatten, 2006). In studies of the projection of musical expression in performance, visual gesture has turned out to be a strong component (Clarke & Davidson, 1998;Dahl & Friberg, 2007;Davidson, 1993Davidson, , 1994Davidson, , 1995Davidson, , 2007. ...
This paper discusses musical gesture from an understanding of musical perception as embodied and enactive, also drawing specifically on Denis Smalley’s [(2007). Space-form and the acousmatic image. Organised Sound, 12(1), 35–58] analysis of performed space. I will provide examples of how choreographies (performed by musicians, with and without their instruments), new music (for Vietnamese and Western instruments), installations, and video art have all been drawn from analysis of gesture in Östersjö’s performance of the guitar composition Toccata Orpheus by Rolf Riehm [1990. Toccata Orpheus. Munich: Ricordi]. In Riehm’s piece, the bodily action of the performer is treated as an intentional compositional parameter and the notated structure thus generates a specific choreography in performance. In Go To Hell, this approach is taken further towards the development of a gesture-based compositional practice, where composition is understood, not as the organisation of sound objects, but as the structuring of gestural-sonic objects [Godøy, R. I. (2006). Gestural-sonorous objects: Embodied extensions of schaeffer’s conceptual apparatus. Organised Sound, 11(2), 149–157; Östersjö, S. (2008). SHUT UP ‘N’ PLAY! Negotiating the musical work (PhD thesis). Lund University, Malmö].
... Det viktige her er den meningsbaerende funksjonen til en gest. Det er det som skiller den fra andre bevegelser (Hatten, 2006). Gester, ved å vaere en bevegelse, treffer derfor innenfor det fysiske aspektet av mennesket, mens gester, ved å ha en meningsbaerende funksjon som kan oppfattes mentalt av andre, treffer innenfor det kognitive hos mennesket. ...
Through this study I take it upon myself to describe how my own rock band work to facilitate relational activity with an audience during a concert. The methods used for researching the field are a mix between self-ethnography and auto- ethnography.
The empirical material was gathered through complete participation and video recordings of three different band rehearsals and one concert. They all took place during autumn, 2015. The recordings were later transcribed and analyzed to develop descriptive narratives. From these narratives I single out happenings and situations that I believe will give answer to my research questions, and use relevant theory as support.
Through my work I discovered that the methods used by the band to facilitate relational activity can be separated into three categories. Universe of the lyrics, audience involvement and “showing”. The methods in the first category attempt to give the audience a better sense of what goes on in the story of the song. There exists a desire to ensnare the audience to start reflecting over what happens to the characters and the places of the song. The methods in the second category has an aim to engage the audience physically during the concert. As examples here we can find getting the audience to clap along with the rhythm of the song or even making them dance. The methods found in the third category are purely aimed at entertaining the audience and bring about energy on the stage as part of the concert as a whole.
I also describe how the band plans, rehearse and carry out these methods of facilitating relational activity in the rehearsal room and during a concert. The planning is characterized by being solely focused on what they are going to do, and not what they are going to do if something does not go according to plan. As for rehearsal I find that some of the methods used in concert are also used during rehearsal. Even though there is no audience present. In place of the missing audience the band uses an imaginary audience to which they direct their methods.
Towards the end of the thesis I suggest steps that can be taken next and how my findings can be used in different places. Examples are use in education on several levels and use in different organizations for popular music like BRAK and STAR.
... Theorists have argued that music itself could be conceived as gesture. For example, Robert S. Hatten (2006) broadly defined gesture as "any energetic shaping through time that may be interpreted as significant." Hatten suggested that his definition directly included any motor action, sensory perception, or their combination, and indirectly included representation of "sonic gesture in notation" (p. 1). ...
This document is my PUBLISHED doctoral dissertation
... Gesture is most generally defined as communicative (whether intended or not), expressive, energetic shaping through time (including characteristic features of musicality such as beat, rhythm, timing of exchanges, contour, intensity), regardless of medium (channel) or sensory-motor source (intermodal or cross-modal). (Hatten 2004, p. 95) In this description, "energetic shaping through time" can apply to musical elements such as rhythm, pitch contour and intensity (Hatten 2006 This perspective serves as a starting point for many researchers in the field (Gritten & King 2011, p. 1), inspiring Anthony Gritten and Elaine King's definition of gesture as "movement or change in state that becomes marked as significant by an agent" (Gritten and King 2006, p. xx). Hatten argues that gestures that do not intentionally convey information still represent richness and subtlety, which reveal important aspects of the human character and play a valuable role as vehicles for expression. ...
Gestural interfaces broaden musicians’ scope for physical expression and offer possibilities for creating more engaging and dynamic performances with digital technology. Increasing affordability and accessibility of motion-based sensing hardware has prompted a recent rise in the use of gestural interfaces and multimodal interfaces for musical performance. Despite this, few performers adopt these systems as their main instrument. The lack of widespread adoption outside academic and research contexts raises questions about the relevance and viability of existing systems. This research identifies and addresses key challenges that musicians face when navigating technological developments in the field of gestural performance. Through a series of performances utilising a customised gestural system and an expert user case study, I have combined autoethnographic insights as a performer/designer with feedback from professional musicians to gain a deeper understanding of how musicians engage with gestural interfaces. Interviews and video recordings have been analysed within a phenomenological framework, resulting in a set of design criteria and strategies informed by creative practitioner perspectives. This thesis argues that developing the sensorimotor skills of musicians is integral to enhancing the potential of current gestural systems. Refined proprioceptive skills and kinaesthetic awareness are particularly important when controlling non-tactile gestural interfaces, which lack the haptic feedback afforded by traditional acoustic instruments. However, approaches in the field of gestural system design for music tend to favour technical and functional imperatives over the development of the kinaesthetic sense. Building on a growing body of gestural interface design and human–computer interaction (HCI) literature, this research offers practice-based insights that acknowledge the changing face of musicianship in response to interaction with gestural sensing technologies. To encourage enhanced physical aptitude and more nuanced movement control amongst musicians, I have applied embodied interaction design and dance-based perspectives to musical contexts, developing a multimodal environment that provides a range of design strategies for musicians to explore relationships between sound and movement while developing an awareness of their own movement potential.
... Musicologists use the term "musical gesture" as a tool for score analysis, referring not to actual body movements in space, but to implied movements, or motivic elements, in a sound structure (e.g. Hatten, 2006;Lidov, 2005). But what happens when musical gestures move from paper to the embodied world? ...
Musical performances provide a rich context for studying complex spatial and embodied modes of group learning. This paper proposes a framework for analyzing gesture in musical performances, in order to highlight the ways musicians' movements reflect and promote their emerging and changing conceptions of a piece of music. The constructs of expressive musical gesture (at the individual level of analysis) and group expressive musical gesture (at the collective level) are used to analyze a series of five sequential performances of a musical passage by a string quartet during rehearsal. The analysis identifies three functions of embodied gesture for score interpretation: (1) gestures served as a tool for group interpretation in passages that had previously been pointed to by verbal exchanges; (2) gestures served to fine-tune the location and enactment of dynamic markings in the score; and (3) group expressive gestures in the final “take” of the rehearsal incorporated group expressive gestures from other takes, constituting a negotiated set of score interpretations.
... 136-137). This connection is the case due to the inextricable link between rhythm and bodily movement and gestures, which contain emotional information (Hatten, 2006;Seivers, Polansky, Casey, & Wheatley, 2013). ...
... The term "gesture" can also be extended past physical actions into musical and sonic domains [6]. For example, Hatten broadly describes gesture as "any energetic shaping through time that may be interpreted as significant" [7]. ...
Performing artists have frequently used technology to sense and extend the body's natural expressivity through live control of multimedia. However, the sophistication, emotional content and variety of expression possible through the original physical channels are often not captured by these technologies and thus cannot be transferred from body to digital media. In this article the author brings together research from expressive performance analysis, machine learning and technological performance extension techniques to define a new framework for recognition and extension of expressive physical performance.
... EMG is well suited for the continuous control of sound synthesis parameters. Gesture-parameter mapping strategies, such as "one-to-many" mapping, or "many-to-one" [6], are highly relevant to EMG. Mapping strategies typically involve interpolation [7,8], to imitate the deterministic and linear aspects of instrument response. ...
The author presents the challenges and opportunities in the use of the electromyogram (EMG), a signal representing muscle activity, for digital musical instrument applications. The author presents basic mapping paradigms and the place of the EMG in multimodal interaction and describes initial trials in machine learning. It is proposed that nonlinearities in musical instrument response cannot be modelled only by parameter interpolation and require strategies of extrapolation. The author introduces the concepts of intention, effort, and restraint as such strategies, to exploit, as well as confront limitations of, the use of muscle signals in musical performance.
... Hatten states: "I define human gesture rather inclusively as any energetic shaping through time that may be interpreted as significant. " (Hatten 2006, p. 1) Anthony Gritten and Elaine King (2011, p. 1) furthermore are supporting him with this statement: " Hatten's definition of human gesture as 'any energetic shaping through time that may be interpreted as significant ' (2006, p. 1) provides a central starting point for researchers. " (Gritten & King 2011, p. 1) But most attempts to find a definition of musical gesture remain "vague to some extent" (Jensenius et al. 2010, p. 30, see also Ishino & Stam 2011, p. 4). ...
This volume brings together contributions by philosophers, art historians and artists who discuss, interpret and analyse the moving and gesturing body in the arts. Broadly inspired by phenomenology, and taking into account insights from cognitive science, the contribution of the motor body in watching a film, attending a dance or theatre performance, looking at paintings or drawings, and listening to music is explored from a diversity of perspectives. This volume is intended for both the specialist and non-specialist in the fields of art, philosophy and cognitive science, and testifies to the burgeoning interest for the moving and gesturing body, not only in the creation but also in the perception of works of art. Imagination is tied to our capacity to silently resonate with the way a work of art has been or is created.
... Terminology is important given different gesture definitions, so for this article gesture is defined as a body movement in the pedagogical process of music making that carries either an intention (Gritten & King, 2011) or a perceived meaning (Hatten, 2006). Focus is specifically on teachers' gesticulations, classified from two perspectives: 1) spontaneous movements of the hands and arms that accompany speech that are not associated with a practical music making experience (spontaneous co-verbal gestures, McNeill 1992;; ...
Teachers’ communication of musical knowledge through physical gesture represents a valuable pedagogical field in need of investigation. This exploratory case study compares the gestural behaviour of three piano teachers while giving individual lessons to students who differed according to piano proficiency levels. The data was collected by video recordings of one-to-one piano lessons and gestures were categorized using two gesture classifications: the spontaneous co-verbal gesture classification (McNeill, 1992; 2005) and spontaneous co-musical gesture classification (Simones, Schroeder & Rodger, 2013). Poisson regression analysis and qualitative observation suggest a relationship between teachers’ didactic intentions and the types of gesture they produced while teaching, as shown by differences in gestural category frequency between teaching students of higher and lower levels of proficiency. Such reported agreement between teachers’ gestural approach in relation to student proficiency levels indicates a teachers’ gestural scaffolding approach whereby teachers adapted gestural communicative channels to suit students’ specific conceptual skill levels.
... Many kinds of movements of a person can communicate psychological or physiological experiences and purposes, and this has made for confusion in discussions by psychologists and linguists about what is a gesture (Hatten 2006). Attention focused on an a priori categorization of the multifarious special uses or products of gestures, according to contrived grammatical and semantic rules and symbols, leaves the motivating source of timing, form and feeling obscure. ...
... The present lack of research on this topic, coming as it does from several different standpoints, provides impetus for a research focus on the role of teacher gestures in establishing and facilitating communication with their students in the process of student skill acquisition, in instrumental music teaching/learning. For this article 'gesture' is defined as a body movement in the pedagogical process of music making that carries an intention (Gritten & King, 2011) and/or a perceived meaning (Hatten, 2006). This definition constitutes an amalgamation of several ideas around gesture definition here used to account with the undoubtedly intentional and communicative context of teaching/learning to play a musical instrument. ...
The significance of the “physicality” involved in learning to play a musical instrument and the essential role of teachers are areas in need of research. This article explores the role of gesture within teacher–student communicative interaction in one-to-one piano lessons. Three teachers were required to teach a pre-selected repertoire of two contrasting pieces to three students studying piano grade 1. The data was collected by video recordings of piano lessons and analysis based on the type and frequency of gestures employed by teachers in association to teaching behaviours specifying where gestures fit under (or evade) predefined classifications. Spontaneous co-musical gestures were observed in the process of piano tuition emerging with similar general communicative purposes as spontaneous co-verbal gestures and were essential for the process of musical communication between teachers and students. Observed frequencies of categorized gestures varied significantly between different teaching behaviours and between the three teachers. Parallels established between co-verbal and co-musical spontaneous gestures lead to an argument for extension of McNeill’s (2005) ideas of imagery–language–dialectic to imagery–music–dialectic with relevant implications for piano pedagogy and fields of study invested in musical communication.
... In human communication, Kendon has argued that gestures have to be carried out consciously since they are intentional (Kendon 2004,15). Hatten, on the other hand, argues that musical gestures may be performed unconsciously but still be valid as gestures if they are observed as significant by the perceiver (Hatten 2006 are also ambiguous cases where one person may perceive an action as intentional and another person may see it as unintentional. ...
We experience and understand the world, including music, through body movement?when we hear something, we are able to make sense of it by relating it to our body movements, or form an image in our minds of body movements. Musical Gestures is a collection of essays that explore the relationship between sound and movement. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to the fundamental issues of this subject, drawing on ideas, theories and methods from disciplines such as musicology, music perception, human movement science, cognitive psychology, and computer science.
This chapter draws on prompts from Rolf Inge Godøy, Edmund Husserl, and a range of Indigenous, queer, and decolonial phenomenological thinkers to frame a theory of gestural time for music that rethinks the relationship between experience and perception. It plays with the distinction between Husserl’s “exact” and “descriptive” sciences, putting the latter to work as a productive foil to the drive for empirical exactitude that animates much perception and cognition theory. It does so not to replace exactitude, but to enrich the experiential nexus. Gesture emerges as an at least equally (and perhaps more) plausible first principle for reunderstanding the mechanisms by which perception functions. Focusing on a debate on categorical identity between Rainer Polak and Justin London, it considers the possibility that a turn to affect—understood in Baruch Spinoza’s sense of a pre-personal flow of force relations that condition the very possibility of experience and perception in the first place—can work to elide certain kinds of experimental cleavings to a priori category distinctions and to at least provisionally displace perceptual exactitude as the primary location for understanding musical experience.
The article is an overview of the most important concepts in the field of musical semiotics, and at the same time an indication of which of them have potential in relation to the study of metal music. Particular attention was paid to the method of musematic analysis, consistently used and developed for almost half a century by Philip Tagg, but also appreciated and practiced by other researchers. The starting point for the author is the state of research in the field of “metal musicology” and theory of music ‒ there is still no adequate, new methodology, and at the same time a common space and a thread of understanding between disciplines and methodologies. Such an interdisciplinary perspective can be semiotics, especially musical, which is a valuable alternative and supplement to sociological, literary and cultural studies, etc. It has potential both where music is a (subordinate) medium of the message and a “amplifier” of the text, and where, through its structure and dramaturgy expresses “itself” in a way, constituting an abstract play of sounds and timbres.
Gesture in a broader sense is more than a physical movement but, can also be modes of expression representing specific meanings. Movements with meaning embodies gesture and gesture exists in various artforms like music because of its capacity to express. Its capability to transform through time and space makes it akin to energy and it is parallel with the art of composing music. Musical gesture however, are being studied at different levels so as to classify and to relate different functions of gestures. This article intends to demonstrate the use of musical gestures into composing music for a solo wind instrument. Three solo pieces for clarinet were written by three different composers approaching musical composition through gestural writing. To realize the imagined sound and movements of the clarinet, the composers’ composing process concentrated more on the gestural movements and tone colours of the selected wind instrument. The musical gesture in these three solo pieces is actually capturing the movement and sense of movement through music, and its essence lies in the subconscious lines connected to create direction and motion in both pieces. This compositional approach also gives the composers more compositional freedom and enriches their compositional process.
Keywords: music composition, musical gesture, solo pieces for clarinet, contemporary music.
The research project "Acousmatic Foley" addresses common traits between foley art and Concrete Music, based on the idea that the foley artist is an acousmatic listener and, in turn, that acousmatic listening is a form of fiction. In this line, the study argues that both fields have similar treatment of the "sonorous object". For this purpose, the research builds on two lines of thought: the "son-en-scène" and the "mise-en-son". Firstly, the "son-en-scène" focuses on the sounds of the filmic miseen-scène (and its sound props), from very early cases to contemporary instances. The focus on these sound-props provides a perspective of sound for film that emphasizes its role as a tool of fiction and, thus, foley as the craft that leads to that experience. Secondly, "mise-en-son" sheds light on the making of the sound itself by exploring the concept of musical gesture. Either in contexts in which the musical gesture is visible (as with instruments), more cryptic (as with electronic devices), or completely delegated (as in acousmatic music), gesture can be seen a form of agency. Given that foley consists of maneuvering a sound-prop, gesture is as central to foley as it is to musical practices. This paper focus on the idea that gesture carries the same conception as the "sonorous object", that of an "intentional unit". In line with this, and in particular when of acousmatic nature, the research argues that the sonorous object is analogous to the sound-prop. In the end, these two lines of thought (son-en-scènce and mise-en-son) bridge the poietic and esthetic, as in Nattiez's semiotic distinction, towards an experience of "acousmatic foley".
Editor's note: This volume presents diverse views on the nature and status of the body in relation to a variety of artforms, including music, film, advertisements, painting, video works, installations, typography, photographs and performance. My sincere thanks to all the contributors for their input and patience throughout the editorial process.
I am deeply indebted to my colleagues in Visual Studies who have enthusiastically encouraged, inspired and supported me on this research journey. I am especially grateful to Amanda du Preez, Rory du Plessis, Lize Kriel and Janine Engelbrecht for stimulating conversations and for their unconditional friendship. My deepest thanks go to Alexander Johnson, Chair of the School of the Arts at the University of Pretoria (UP), for unfailingly supporting all my research endeavours.
Dirk van den Berg, my PhD supervisor at the University of the Free State (UFS), played an important role in setting the groundwork for the ideas that have led to this publication and I thank him for generously sharing his extensive knowledge in the fields of philosophy and embodiment with me.
I wish to acknowledge a substantial grant from UP that allowed me to take the study leave needed to bring this volume to completion. I would also like to thank Lizette Hermann and Liesl Hager of the Pretoria University Law Press (PULP) for so efficiently managing the reviewing process and the publication of this book, and Isabeau de Meyer and Kate Painting for editing various drafts of the manuscript.
Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Rabie and Matthew for their steadfast belief in me and for always being my anchor.
Drawing on perspectives from music psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, musicology, clinical psychology, and music education, Music and Mental Imagery provides a critical overview of cutting-edge research on the various types of mental imagery associated with music. The four main parts cover an introduction to the different types of mental imagery associated with music such as auditory/musical, visual, kinaesthetic, and multimodal mental imagery; a critical assessment of established and novel ways to measure mental imagery in various musical contexts; coverage of different states of consciousness, all of which are relevant for, and often associated with, mental imagery in music, and a critical overview of applications of mental imagery in health, educational, and performance settings.
By both critically reviewing up-to-date scientific research and offering new empirical results, this book provides a unique overview of the different types and origins of mental imagery in musical contexts, various ways to measure them, and intriguing insights into related mental phenomena such as mind-wandering and synaesthesia. This will be of particular interest for scholars and researchers of music psychology and music education. It will also be useful for practitioners working with music in applied health and educational contexts.
The purpose of this study is to reconsider musical narrativity and gesture in the semiotic sense through debate among the former studies, taking the examples of Beethoven and Mahler. From these findings, I conclude that narrative analysis is a kind of syntagmatic analysis. Musical events in narrative discourse are regarded as (1) narrative-defining features (Micznik in Jounal of the Royal Musical Association 126/2: 193–249, 2001), (2) representations rather than physical entities (Meelberg, Vincent in New Sounds, New Stories. Narrativity in Contemporary Music. Amsterdam: Leiden University Press, 2006), and (3) isotopy in the Greimasian sense (Tarasti in A Theory of Musical Semiotics. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994). Significant events in music are defined by the syntagmatic perspective and the work’s strategy (Almén in A Theory of Musical Narrative. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2008); more precisely, telos (the goal of the lineal process) is a central position in narrative discourse. We need more aspects of an author for narrative analysis and its procedure, and that many significant and elaborate theories and ideas frequently seem to relate to the lack of the composer’s stance or the author’s psychological and strategic perspectives. From these aspects of musical narrativity, in music analysis, we need to take notice of (1) musical gesture that emerges from the textural level, i.e., “the score,” and (2) musical gesture by the composer, which is an attempt to put thoughts and images into compositions through the composer’s perception by means of the five senses, “the body.”KeywordsMusical narrativitySyntagmatic analysisMusical gesturesLudwig van BeethovenGustav Mahler
Jonathan Harvey debuted several novel techniques and elements in his String Quartet No. 2—“temperature” and gender markings, unique to this piece, and the melodic chain technique, a method which he continued to use in his subsequent quartets. Though the melodic chain technique is decipherable from score analysis, and has been explained by the composer in interviews, Harvey’s temperature and gender markings have continued to puzzle scholars, due to vague descriptions that obscure their meaning (especially in the case of the temperature markings) and to the implied stereotypes of themes that are gendered feminine and masculine (more shocking to the modern eye than it was in 1988). The question thus arises: did Harvey engage in a sexist trope with his gendered stereotyping of the themes, or was he ahead of his time by offering a nuanced and fluid approach to understanding gender, guided by his spirituality, presenting the constraints of binary stereotypes before dismantling them? Building on the scholarship of gender theory and musical gesture and embodiment, this article examines the meaning of gender in this piece.
Los fenómenos interartísticos son una constante en la historia de los productos culturales que ofrece innumerables ejemplos de la coexistencia de medios artísticos diferentes en una misma obra. En particular, es especialmente intenso el caso de las relaciones entre música y literatura. Así, este artículo ofrece una panorámica de las distintas disciplinas y perspectivas teóricas que se han ocupado del análisis de los fenómenos interartísticos literario-musicales. En concreto, fija la atención en las vías comparatista y semiótica para, más adelante, observar a qué tendencias pueden adscribirse los estudios que, dentro del ámbito hispánico y de la música popular, se interesan por este tipo de productos. Finalmente, se formulan unas reflexiones donde, de manera preliminar, se constata la pervivencia del enfoque de la literatura comparada y una acusada tendencia a centrarse en la parte literaria, obviando la musical.
PORTUGUÊS:
O artigo problematiza uma categoria de gestos intrínsecos à performance musical, que acreditamos permitir avaliar com mais objetividade a condição “incorporada” do performer na construção das técnicas que suportam a performance. Abordamos a cognição incorporada a partir da hipótese mimética de Cox (2001, 2011, 2016), a fim de fundamentar o que entendemos serem as formas do comportamento mimético que subjaz os domínios gestuais constitutivos da performance musical. O estudo argumenta que a caracterização desses domínios gestuais é mais significativamente determinada pela “função” gestual, ou seja, a intenção intrínseca do gesto na realização musical, seja esta função gestual geradora, modeladora ou mímica. E chamamos atenção para o fato de não haver gesto gerador ou modelador que não se origine de um gesto
mímico, o que é ainda significativamente negligenciado pela pedagogia da performance.
ENGLISH:
This paper problematizes a gestural category intrinsic to music performance, which we believe allows us to assess with more objectivity the embodied condition of the performer when she or he develops the techniques that support the performance. We approach the embodied cognition from Cox's mimetic hypothesis (2001, 2011, 2016), to substantiate what we understand to be the forms of mimetic behavior that underlie the gestural domains that constitute a music performance. The study argues that the gestural “function” most significantly determines the characterization of these gestural domains, that is, the intrinsic intention of the gesture in music performance, whether this gestural function is generative, modeler, or mimic. And we call attention to the fact that there is no generative or modeler gesture that does not originate from a mimic gesture, something that is still significantly neglected by the performance pedagogy.
In this essay I argue that Plato’s The Republic, Book 3, offers an often overlooked aspect of the affective dimension in Plato’s philosophy of music. The key concept is mimesis. In connection with current research on the topic of Plato and mimesis in The Republic, I propose that Plato’s treatment of music in Book 3 offers new ways of understanding the concept of mimesis more closely in relation to music. Musical mimesis prepares the soul for thinking (logos) through musical experience. Thus, music is not merely a preparation for philosophy in the education of the human being. It may also be seen as an experience-based precondition for it. I explore how the concept of musical mimesis may shed light on the tension between music and philosophy in Plato’s thinking. I start by discussing different perspectives on how to read Plato. The argument is then developed in three phases. First, I examine the wide concept of mousiké techné, with specific focus on its relation to philosophy in Plato’s dialogues. Second, I undertake a close reading of the treatment of mimesis in The Republic, Book 3. Finally, these perspectives are discussed in relation to current discourse on music philosophy. Musical mimesis offers a new understanding of the relation between music and philosophy in Plato’s thinking, which continues to pose a challenge to how we think about this relation today.
Des aspects éphémères, tels que le geste et le son, sont généralement négligés dans l’examen des objets matériels archéologiques, en particulier les aérophones. Malgré de vastes collections d’instruments sonores récupérés dans la région archéologique de la Grande Nicoya associée à la période Tempisque (de l’an 500 avant J.-C. à l’an 300 après J.-C.), nous savons peu de choses sur la façon dont les communautés produisaient et expérimentaient le son. Ma recherche comprend une analyse détaillée de la fabrication et de l’utilisation possible d’instruments sonores et met en évidence une gamme d’interfaces gestuelles (ergonomiques, interprétatives et sensorielles). Elle cherche à contribuer à notre compréhension de traditions de longue date en matière de performance et à explorer les interactions potentielles entre les humains et les objets au sein des communautés anciennes de la Grande Nicoya.
This paper explores how a performer generates a cognitive infrastructure in support of a performance, and advocates for regarding such cognitive processes as a kind of agency. This notion of "facilitative agency," which draws on Edwin Gordon's work on audiation as well as David Lewin's p-model in his "Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception," is illustrated in an analysis of the opening theme from Beethoven's Piano Sonata in G major, op. 14, no. 2, second movement. The paper closes by considering the implications of the above for the training of student musicians.
The unprecedented popularity of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor is well documented. Having written it at the age of 18, Rachmaninov performed it for the first time in 1892, thereby launching the career of what many have called one of the world’s most popular piano pieces. Yet, despite its fame, many critics—as well as the composer himself—have pondered the reasons for the prelude’s adoration. Both critics and composer agree: the surfeit in audience enthusiasm is incongruous with the Prelude’s deficit in musical content. Perhaps the most intriguing commentary on this Prelude is that written by Theodor Adorno, whose discussion invokes a rich and unusual palette of metaphorical imagery by referencing such distinct items as “heavy artillery,” “lion’s paws,” “megalomania,” and “Nero’s complex.” This essay will explore more closely these juxtaposed aspects surfacing within Adorno’s essay. Any such exploration of Adorno’s literary ciphers will inevitably lead far afield, hence my paper will touch upon such disparate topics as Marxist economic theory, the Nero Complex, and recent studies on musical gesture. In so doing, however, we may not only recover a deeper appreciation of Adorno’s keen musical insights, but also gain potential keys to understanding the central paradox of “the C-sharp.”
The thesis presents a perceptual approach to audio-visual instrument design, composition and performance. The approach informs practical work as well as a parametric visualisation model, which can be used to analyse sensory dominance, sonic expression and spatial presence in any audio-visual performance language.
The practical work intends for the image to function as a stage scene, which reacts to the music and allows for attention to focus on the relation between the sounds themselves. This is challenging, because usually vision dominates over audition. To clarify the problem, the thesis extrapolates from audio-visual theory, psychology, neuroscience, interaction design and musicology. The investigations lead to three creative principles, which inform the design of an instrument that combines a custom zither and audio-visual 3D software. The instrument uses disparities between the acoustic and digital outputs so as to explore those creative principles: a) to threshold the performerʼs control over the instrument and the instrumentʼs unpredictability, in ways that convey musical expression; b) to facilitate perceptual simplification of visual dynamics; c) to create an audio-visual relationship that produces a sense of causation, and simultaneously confounds the cause and effect relationships. This latter principle is demonstrated with a study on audio-visual mapping and perception, whose conclusions are equally applicable to the audio-visual relationship in space. Yet importantly, my creative decisions are not driven by demonstrative aims. Regarding the visual dynamics, the initial creative work assures perceptual simplification, but the final work exposes a gray area that respects to how the audienceʼs attention might change over time.
In any case, the parametric visualisation model can reveal how any audio-visual performance work might converge or diverge from these three creative principles. It combines parameters for interaction, sonic & visual dynamics, audio-visual relationship, physical performance setup and semantics. The parameters for dynamics and semantics reflect how stimuli inform attention at a particular timescale. The thesis uses the model to analyse a set of audio-visual performance languages, to represent my solo performance work from a creative perspective, and to visualise the workʼs versatility in collaboration with other musicians.
Keywords:
NIME, audio-visual performance, music, 3D environments, perception, attention
The thesis presents a perceptual approach to audio-visual instrument design, composition and performance. The approach informs practical work as well as a parametric visualisation model, which can be used to analyse sensory dominance, sonic expression and spatial presence in any audio-visual performance language.
The practical work intends for the image to function as a stage scene, which reacts to the music and allows for attention to focus on the relation between the sounds themselves. This is challenging, because usually vision dominates over audition. To clarify the problem, the thesis extrapolates from audio-visual theory, psychology, neuroscience, interaction design and musicology. The investigations lead to three creative principles, which inform the design of an instrument that combines a custom zither and audio-visual 3D software. The instrument uses disparities between the acoustic and digital outputs so as to explore those creative principles: a) to threshold the performerʼs control over the instrument and the instrumentʼs unpredictability, in ways that convey musical expression; b) to facilitate perceptual simplification of visual dynamics; c) to create an audio-visual relationship that produces a sense of causation, and simultaneously confounds the cause and effect relationships. This latter principle is demonstrated with a study on audio-visual mapping and perception, whose conclusions are equally applicable to the audio-visual relationship in space. Yet importantly, my creative decisions are not driven by demonstrative aims. Regarding the visual dynamics, the initial creative work assures perceptual simplification, but the final work exposes a gray area that respects to how the audienceʼs attention might change over time.
In any case, the parametric visualisation model can reveal how any audio-visual performance work might converge or diverge from these three creative principles. It combines parameters for interaction, sonic & visual dynamics, audio-visual relationship, physical performance setup and semantics. The parameters for dynamics and semantics reflect how stimuli inform attention at a particular timescale. The thesis uses the model to analyse a set of audio-visual performance languages, to represent my solo performance work from a creative perspective, and to visualise the workʼs versatility in collaboration with other musicians.
The aim of this study was to investigate performer nonverbal behaviour in popular music performance in order to understand the use and functions of gestures, postures, and facial expression. To this end, the study begins by reviewing relevant psychological and sociological research including Ekman and Friesen and Argyle's categorisations of nonverbal behaviour. Drawing on these specific categories, functions of nonverbal behaviours in popular music performance are proposed. These include: to maintain performer self-control; to provide musical, narrative, emotional and personal information; to regulate and manipulate relationships between performer, co-performer and audience. The investigative work focuses on a case study of The Corrs and is carried out by observing two commercially available film recordings of the band in live performance. The songs demonstrate that within this band, three of the four members take turns singing solos. In the first performance, What can I do? is sung by Andrea (principle vocal), and in the second performance, No frontiers is sung by Sharon and Caroline. Focusing on the soloists, all their nonverbal behaviours are classified in terms of types (e.g., emblem, illustrator, regulator, adaptor, affect display) and frequency of behaviour. The results demonstrate that Ekman and Friesen and Argyle's categorisations provide a complete description of the nonverbal behaviours found in the performances. Moreover, the analysis reveals differences between individuals and the two songs. With these findings, the paper concludes that nonverbal behaviours in this type of performance are crucial to the development, production and perception of the musical performance. Though preliminary, the study indicates a need for much more detailed research of this topic if performers, educators and researchers are to understand and exploit the nonverbal aspects of a musical communication fully.
Sounds appear to hold a resistance within themselves, a resistance different from the physical resistance one engages with when playing a musical instrument. I here argue that this felt resistance or tactility can be heard in the sounds cross-modally by listeners and experienced despite the transparency of instrumental actions and effort an expert performer may achieve. I start by distinguishing the cross-modal phenomenon from instrumental resistance and describe how in dancers' improvised performances with a virtual spatial musical instrument developed and used in the ‘Embodied Generative Music’ project it occurs in a particularly exposed way; I then seek to conceptualise its experience, relating it to perceptive phenomena and concepts of embodied perception; in a third step, I ponder its role in the forming of agency, imagined agency, and expression within musical experience and performance. The text is supported by video clips which appear as supplementary material accessible online via the article's Supplementary tab on the Taylor & Francis website (http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcmr).
This article provides a critical account of the appropriation of semiotics in Anglo-American musicology, its theoretical and discursive foundations, and its impact on the discipline in the period from the mid-1970s to the present. Starting out from the work of Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Philip Tagg in the 1970s, it traces two principal approaches in music semiotics, here termed the ‘structural–analytical’ and the ‘semantic–interpretative’, which draw in significant measure on, respectively, the Saussurean and Peircean legacies. Both differences of musicological tradition and the wider state of the discipline have a part to play in explaining why semiotics never established itself as a discrete and distinctive subfield in the English-speaking world in the way that it did in continental Europe. But with the increasing currency of, among other concerns, topic theory, theories of emotion and affect, and studies of musical gesture and metaphor, it might be argued that semiotics – or, rather, an interdisciplinary aggregation of approaches that might be termed ‘post-semiotic’ – has never had a stronger presence in anglophone musicology than at the present time.
Despite the widespread use of the term gesture in writings about music, the term is not defined in most musical dictionaries. Moreover, as this paper shows, the term is employed by different writers in a wide variety of ways. One common use of the term refers to sonic instances that are close analogies of physical gestures. These could be termed expressive unit gestures which, like physical gestures, are perceived as a short, unified, expressive events. To enable a more detailed study of these, this paper outlines a systematic approach to their description in the hope that these will open possibilities for a more detailed study of this aspect of musical gestures. The HamNoSys notation was developed for the systematic description of sign language. Gestures of sign language are notated through a systematic profiling of the actions involved (hand shapes, movement types, etc.). By analogy a musical gesture can be described through its auditory properties such as accent patterns, pitch contour, register, and so forth. This paper suggests that studying these expressive unit gestures offers a way of linking the dynamics of the music with expressive potential and can, therefore, contribute to an experiential account of music; could lead to new methods of investigating listeners engagement with music; and could potentially offer new ideas in the field of music information retrieval.
Drawing on the composer's insights that link Chinese calligraphy to compositional aesthetics, this article explores the correlation between calligraphic principles and the shaping of musical gestures in Chou Wen-chung's late works. As a calligrapher, Chou transforms the combinatorial sequence of calligraphic strokes to evoke a 'living' image. Likewise, his music is generated from his unique system of variable modes, and the individual notes serve as agents that shape the build-up and dissipation of energy, among other forms of polarities that govern the structural processes according to the duality of yin and yang.
This paper presents the first of a series of studies investigating the role of gestures during teaching and learning to play the piano as part of a PhD research at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in collaboration with the School of Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast (funded by DEL).
Findings from research into the role of body movements and gesture from a performer’s/performing point of view (Davidson 1993,1994; Woodard, 2009; Rodger, 2010), allied to research focused on gesture, communication and education (Cook, Mitchel & Goldin-Meadow, 2008; Trevarthen, Delafield-Butt & Schogler (2011), Sassenberg, 2011) suggest that more attention should be given to the quite overlooked context of instrumental-music teaching, namely to the “physicality” involved in learning to play a musical instrument and the essential role of teachers in the development of this embodied skill. This case study combining qualitative and quantitative approaches, intends to provide an understanding of the role of body movement/gesture in teacher and student communicative interaction during piano lessons, specifically in the communication of symbolic and functional musical knowledge and the impact of body movement/ gesture for teaching and learning. Participants were required to teach/learn two small extracts of contrasting pieces during their usual lessons, according to skill level (identical within each skill group). Initial data was collected by video recordings of piano lessons. The analysis is based on the type and frequency of movements/gestures employed by teachers and students in association with lesson activities, verbal and non-verbal content of the lesson, and verifying if the body movements shown fit under predefined classifications (e.g. McNeill 1992, 2005; Jensenius et al. 2009). Spontaneous gestures co-occurring with the piano teaching process were found and termed as spontaneous co-musical gestures. Whilst having similar communicative purposes as McNeill’s spontaneous co-verbal gestures (1992, 2005) they differ in form/shape and in the nature of the communicative function.
References:
Cook, S., Mitchell, Z. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2008). Gesturing makes learning last. Cognition, 106, 1047-1058.
Davidson, J. (1993). Visual perception of performance manner in the movement of solo musicians. Psychology of Music, 21(2): 103—113.
Davidson, J. (1994). Which areas of a pianist’s body convey information about expressive intention to an audience? Journal of Human Movement Studies, 26: 279—301.
Jensenius, A., Wanderley, M., Godoy, R. & Leman, M. (2010). Musical gestures, Concepts and Methods in research. In R. Godoy and M. Leman (Eds) Musical gestures, sound, movement and meaning. New York: Routledge. 12-35.
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McNeill, D. (2005). Gesture and Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rodger, M. (2010). Musician’s body movements in musical skill acquisition. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Belfast: Queen’s University.
Sassenberg, U. (2011). Thinking hands: how co-speech gestures reflect cognitive processes. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Berlin: Humboldt University.
Trevarthen, C., Delafield-Butt, J. & Schogler, B. (2011). Psychobiology of Musical Gesture: Innate Rhythm, Harmony and Melody. New Perspectives on Music and Gesture. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Woodard, K. (2009). Recovering disembodied spirits: teaching movement to musicians. British Journal of Music Education, 26, 153-172.