Expressiveness in Music From a Multimodal Perspective

This article seeks to unveil quantitative relations between the patterns of movement recurrence of a group of expert clarinetists and expressive sonic manipulations they employ during their performances. The main hypothesis is that the recurrent ancillary gestures of musicians are closely related to their sounded expressive intentions, and that the expressive content imposed by them according to the music structure is reflected in their movement patterns. To conduct this multimodal investigation of expressiveness in music, movement and audio analyses of several clarinet performances of excerpts in the classical repertoire are presented and discussed in conjunction. The results show strong correlations between the recurrence pattern of clarinetists’ ancillary movements and expressive manipulations of timing, timbre, and loudness associated with melodic phrasing and harmonic and dynamic transitions in the performed music excerpts.