Performance Gestures of Musicians: What Structural and Emotional Information Do They Convey?

Abstract. This paper analyzes how expressive gestures of a professional clarinetist contribute to the perception of structural and emotional information in musical performance. The thirty musically trained subjects saw, heard, or both saw and heard the performance. All subjects made the same judgments including a real-time judgment of phrasing, which targeted the experience of structure, and a real-time judgment of tension, which targeted emotional experience. New statistical techniques in the field of Functional Data Analysis [13] can examine data collected from continuous processes and then explore the hidden structures of the data as they change over time. Three main findings add to our knowledge of gesture and movement in music: 1) The visual component carries much of the same structural information as the audio. 2) Gestures elongate the sense of phrasing before an important transition and certain gestures cue the beginning of a new phrase. 3) The importance of the visual informa...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: GW
• Authors: Bradley W. Vines, Marcelo M. Wanderley, Carol Krumhansl, Regina L. Nuzzo, Daniel J. Levitin
• Keywords: Expressive Gestures, Gestures, GW 2003, Real-time Judgment