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Entrainment and musicality in the human system interface

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Abstract

What constitutes our human capacity to engage and be in the same frame of mind as another human? How do we come to share a sense of what ‘looks good’ and what ‘makes sense’? How do we handle differences and come to coexist with them? How do we come to feel that we understand what someone else is experiencing? How are we able to walk in silence with someone familiar and be sharing a peaceful space? All of these aspects are part of human ‘interaction’. In designing interactive technologies designers have endeavoured to explicate, analyse and simulate, our capacity for social adaptation. Their motivations are mixed and include the desires to improve efficiency, improve consumption, to connect people, to make it easier for people to work together, to improve education and learning. In these endeavours to explicate, analyse and simulate, there is a fundamental human capacity that is beyond technology and that facilitates these aspects of being, feeling and thinking with others. That capacity, we suggest, is human entrainment. This is our ability to coordinate the timing of our behaviours and rhythmically synchronise our attentional resources. Expressed within the movements of our bodies and voices, it has a quality that is akin to music. In this paper, disparate domains of research such as pragmatics, social psychology, behaviourism, cognitive science, computational linguistics, gesture, are brought together, and considered in light of the developments in interactive technology, in order to shape a conceptual framework for understanding entrainment in everyday human interaction.

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Notes

  1. http://topologicalmedialab.net/joomla/main/index.php

  2. http://www.infomus.dist.unige.it/

  3. It is akin to aesthetic emotion–e.g. our resonation to the structures, textures, forms and colours of a painting, as well as the theme presented by them. By empathy, I do not mean sympathy.

  4. This is based on the idea of generic structures in memory, which summarise similar events, cf. Barsalou (1988).

  5. This is as in episodic memory, cf. Tulving (1972).

  6. This denotes an individual’s ability to have acquired the knowledge such that they can use it in a sustainable manner; a kind of psychological state whereby someone can maintain their performance of the knowledge over time.

  7. http://www.media.mit.edu/gnl/projects/humanoid/index.html

  8. http://www.soc.northwestern.edu/justine/jc_research.htm

  9. http://www.tosa.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp/

  10. http://www.dipaola.org/sig99/sld002.htm, http://www.dipaola.org/steve/vworlds.html

  11. For further details of these Body Moves, please see Gill et al. (2000).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people for their inspiration over the years in supporting the development of the ideas, Bo Goranzon, Deborah Bekerian, Masahito Kawamori, Herb Clark, Ian Cross, Terry Winograd, Ajit Narayanan, David Good, Mike Cooley, Seija Kulkki, Timo Saari, Hisao Nojima, Yasuhiro Katagiri, Sotaro Kita, David Smith, Jeremy Potter, Jan Borchers, Sha Xin-Wei, Liz Tolbert, Hubert Dreyfus, Adam Kendon and Karamjit S. Gill. I also thank Colin Tully, William Wong and Martin Loomes of Middlesex University for their support of this research.

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  1. School of Computing Science, Middlesex University, Ravensfield House, The Burroughs, Hendon, London, NW4 4BT, UK

    Satinder P. Gill

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Gill, S.P. Entrainment and musicality in the human system interface. AI & Soc 21, 567–605 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-007-0103-8

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