What is the effect of performers’ experienced emotions on the auditory characteristics of their performances? By asking performers to play a music phrase in response to three different instructions we attempted to answer this question. Performers were instructed to do the following: 1) play while focusing on the technical aspects of their playing; 2) give an expressive performance; and 3) focus on their experienced emotions, prior to which they were subjected to a sadness-inducing mood induction task. Performers were interviewed after each playing condition. We analyzed the tempo, articulation, dynamics, timbre, and vibrato of the performances obtained as well as the interview data. A focus on technique resulted in technically appropriate performances, a focus on expressivity in more extraverted and externally projected performances, and a focus on experienced emotions in more introverted and personal performances. The findings of this exploratory study are valuable for both research and artistic practice and pedagogy.

Listening to music makes us move in various ways. Several factors can affect the characteristics of these movements, including individual factors and musical features. Additionally, music-induced movement may also be shaped by the emotional content of the music, since emotions are an important element of musical expression. This study investigates possible relationships between emotional characteristics of music and music-induced, quasi-spontaneous movement. We recorded music-induced movement of 60 individuals, and computationally extracted features from the movement data. Additionally, the emotional content of the stimuli was assessed in a perceptual experiment. A subsequent correlational analysis revealed characteristic movement features for each emotion, suggesting that the body reflects emotional qualities of music. The results show similarities to movements of professional musicians and dancers, and to emotion-specific nonverbal behavior in general, and could furthermore be linked to notions of embodied music cognition. The valence and arousal ratings were subsequently projected onto polar coordinates to further investigate connections between the emotions of Russell’s (1980) circumplex models and the movement features

The visual channel has been shown to be more informative than the auditory channel in perceptual judgments of a performer's level of expression. Previous work has revealed a positive relationship between amplitude of music-related movement and ratings of expression, for example, and observers have been shown to be sensitive to kinematic features of music-related movement. In this study, we investigate relationships between the kinematics of a conductors' expressive gestures and ratings of perceived expression. Point-light representations (totalling 10 minutes) of two professional conductors were presented to participants who provided continuous ratings of perceived valence, activity, power, and overall expression using a virtual slider interface. Relationships between these ratings and 11 kinematic variables computationally extracted from the movement data were subsequently examined using linear regression. Higher levels of expressivity were found to be conveyed by gestures characterized by increased amplitude, greater variance, and higher speed of movement.

Listening to music often is associated with spontaneous body movements frequently synchronized with its periodic structure. The notion of embodied cognition assumes that intelligent behavior does not emerge from mere passive perception, but requires goal-directed interactions between the organism and its environment. According to this view, one could postulate that we may use our bodily movements to help parse the metric structure of music. The aim of this study was to investigate how pulsations on different metrical levels manifest in music-induced movement. Musicians were presented with a piece of instrumental music in 4/4 time, played at four different tempi ranging from 92 to 138 bpm. Participants were instructed to move to the music, and their movements were recorded with a high quality optical motion capture system. Subsequently, signal processing methods and principal components analysis were applied to extract movement primitives synchronized with different metrical levels. We found differences between metric levels in terms of the prevalence of synchronized eigenmovements. For instance, mediolateral movements of arms were found to be frequently synchronized with the tactus level pulse, while rotation and lateral flexion of the upper torso were commonly found to exhibit periods of two and four beats, respectively. The results imply that periodicities on several metric levels are simultaneously present in music-induced movement. This could suggest that the metric structure of music is encoded in these movements.

THE ACCURACY WITH WHICH INDIVIDUALS ARE ABLE to synchronize with each other using vision alone is well documented. Less attention, however, has been given to the spatio-temporal characteristics of human movement that offer cues for such synchronization. The present study investigated such cues in the context of conductor-musician synchronization. Twenty-four participants tapped in time with dynamic point-light representations of traditional conducting gestures, in which the clarity of the beat and overall tempo was manipulated. A series of nine linear regression analyses identified absolute acceleration along the trajectory as the main cue for synchronization, while beat clarity and tempo influenced the weights of the variables in the emergent models.

THE SPATIO-TEMPORAL PROPERTIES OF HUMAN movement that induce the percept of a visual beat were investigated in three experiments. Experiment 1, in which participants synchronized key presses with point-light representations of simple conducting gestures, showed that visual beat induction was related to acceleration along the trajectory ( a ), and, to a lesser extent, high instantaneous speed ( v ). Experiment 2, in which the curvature component of the gestures was held constant, largely supported this finding. Experiment 3, in which the speed component of the gestures was held constant, indicated that neither radius of curvature ( r ) nor rate of change of radius of curvature ( r ') alone were related to visual beat induction. In addition, analysis of the characteristics of the gestures highlighted inconsistencies between descriptions of the beat in the conducting literature, and descriptions of biological motion in the human movement literature,with the gestures used here conforming to the latter.

Previous work suggests that the perception of a visual beat in conductors’ gestures is related to certain physical characteristics of the movements they produce, most notably to periods of negative acceleration, and low position in the vertical axis. These findings are based on studies that have presented participants with somewhat simple gestures, and in which participants have been required to simply tap in time with the beat. Thus, it is not clear how generalizable these findings are to real-world conducting situations, in which a conductor uses considerably more complex gestures to direct an ensemble of musicians playing actual instruments. The aims of the present study were to examine the features of conductors’ gestures with which ensemble musicians synchronize their performance in an ecologically valid setting and to develop automatic feature extraction methods for the analysis of audio and movement data. An optical motion capture system was used to record the gestures of an expert conductor directing an ensemble of expert musicians over a 20-minute period. A simultaneous audio recording of the performance of the ensemble was also made and synchronized with the motion capture data. Four short excerpts were selected for analysis, two in which the conductor communicated the beat with high clarity, and two in which the beat was communicated with low clarity. Twelve movement variables were computationally extracted from the movement data and cross-correlated with the pulse of the ensemble’s performance, the latter based on the spectral flux of the audio signal. Results of the analysis indicated that the ensemble’s performance tended to be most highly synchronized with periods of maximal deceleration along the trajectory, followed by periods of high vertical velocity (a higher correlation than deceleration but a longer delay).