Abstract
In our engagement with music, not only the physical experience of sound is important. Also the interplay between body movements, musical gestures and the cognitive processes of performers and listeners is part of our experience. Yet, this multimodal aspect is not always fully considered when analyzing music performance. In this paper, we want to establish a framework for a multi-layered analysis of music performance, building on data retrieved from quantitative and qualitative procedures and involving the perspectives of composer, performer and musicologist. The performance of a classical guitarist was analyzed in detail, using both a ‘bottom-up’ approach (audio-analysis and motion-capture) and a ‘top-down’ perspective (annotations from video-footage, perceived phrasing and the composer’s, performer’s and researcher’s perspective). These different analytical layers were compared and evaluated, which pointed out that multiple perspectives can reinforce each other in understanding musical intentions and can help detecting mismatches between qualitative and quantitative data. The analytical framework developed could be an important step in the coupling of performer’s intentions with the expressive enactment of a musical score.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Stimulated recall’ is the overarching term for introspective research procedures through which cognitive processes can be investigated by inviting subjects to recall their thinking during an event when prompted by a video sequence. Benjamin Bloom is considered the first to use the term in 1953, which he described as a method for retrieving memories: “The basic idea underlying the method of stimulated recall is that a subject may be enabled to relive an original situation with vividness and accuracy if he is presented with a large number of cues or stimuli which occurred during the original situation” [18].
- 2.
The filtering and smoothing process was based on the methods used in [12], where noise-measurements are used to obtain the most reliable smoothing result.
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Acknowledgements
This study was partially realized under the FWO-project “Foundations of expressive timing control in music”. Special thanks to Ivan Schepers, who helped developing the pressures sensors and mo-cap markers and Frank Desmet, who assisted in the analysis of the pressure sensors.
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Coorevits, E., Moelants, D., Östersjö, S., Gorton, D., Leman, M. (2016). Decomposing a Composition: On the Multi-layered Analysis of Expressive Music Performance. In: Kronland-Martinet, R., Aramaki, M., Ystad, S. (eds) Music, Mind, and Embodiment. CMMR 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9617. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46282-0_11
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