Introduction
Music is commonly understood as an aural phenomenon, as a pattern of “vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.), described by physics as a series of waves moving through space whose characteristics are strictly related to those of the perceived sounds (Benade, 1990). Besides the understanding of music as an object with its particular construction, other perspectives include a perceiving subject into this definition, with music being “everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music" (Berio et al., 1985). Music is therefore "a certain reciprocal relation established between a person, his behaviour, and a sounding object" (Clifton, 1983, p. 10).
When the experience of music as a whole is taken into account, however, it is obvious that other elements besides its acoustical properties should also become part of the equation. Besides attending live concerts, in fact, an audience can access music through CDs, video-clips, radio, podcasts and digital streaming, as well as enjoy virtual-reality experiences that challenge the boundaries of space and time. New means for music consumption offer innovative audience and performer experiences that not only regard the the auditory musical stimuli, but also a whole series of additional elements that are an integral part of the musical event. The differences between listening to music through our personal listening devices whilst commuting, or in a big stadium at a live concert, between watching a YouTube video and going to the Opera House are intuitively evident, both for the context and the (technological) means that are used. However, further study of the mechanisms that influence the experience of music in each of these contexts can be of great interest for the field of music perception and cognition, as well as lead to more awareness and control of one’s creative possibilities in relation to each channel of communication. An aspect that is apparently less expected but is proving to have a fundamental role in the musician-audience and musician-musician communication is how visual information, in particular body movements, interacts with the auditory one within a musical experience. This is going to be the focus of the present study, with a particular interest on how the qualities of performers’ movements on stage relate to both their own and the audience’s experienced vitality of the piece being performed. The latter is understood as the pattern which arises when one experiences different levels of intensity, tension or other changes throughout a performance (Stern, 1999), describing the evolution of one’s feeling through time without the need to label a specific emotion, therefore replacing the common “joy” or “hatred” with “surging”, “fading away” (Hughes & Franks, 2004), allowing for a more open categorization which seems suitable for this study.
A particular focus will be dedicated to finding a methodology to capture and analyse such movements in an efficient way, taking into account the movement constraints represented by the sole action of playing an instrument and the possibility to apply the results in both the academic as well as the artistic field.
Table of contents:
1. Introduction
2.1 Music-perceiving movements and musical properties
2.2 Music-producing movements and audience experience
2.3 Problematization
2.4 Relevance
3. Methodology
3.1 Laban Technique
3.3 The EyesWeb experimental platform
4.1. Experiment design