Musical Gestures

Sound, Movement, and Meaning

Rolf Inge Godøy, Marc Leman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135183622
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

We experience and understand the world, including music, through body movement–when we hear something, we are able to make sense of it by relating it to our body movements, or form an image in our minds of body movements. Musical Gestures is a collection of essays that explore the relationship between sound and movement. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to the fundamental issues of this subject, drawing on ideas, theories and methods from disciplines such as musicology, music perception, human movement science, cognitive psychology, and computer science.

Part I
Gestures in Music

Chapter 1
Why Study Musical Gestures?

Marc Leman and Rolf Inge Godøy

1 Introduction

People seem to be making gestures to music everywhere, swaying their bodies and waving their hands to the beat of the music while dancing, attending a concert, or walking down the street while listening to their MP3 players. Listeners often imitate the gestures of musicians by playing air guitar, for example, or mimicking the facial movements and body language of pop stars or conductors, and they often do so without any formal musical training. Why is it that so many listeners are able to spontaneously make gestures that seem to fit the music? Why do they make these gestures? Furthermore, how are these gestures related to the music, and how are these gestures related to the gestures of performers? Or in general, what are gestures? And how do gestures function in the contexts of music performance and listening?

Seeing how ubiquitous music-related gestures are, and seeing the enthusiasm and joy that people express through these gestures, we conceive of musical gestures as an expression of a profound engagement with music, and as an expression of a fundamental connection that exists between music and movement. In fact, we believe that musical experience is inseparable from the sensations of movement, and hence, that studying these gestures, what we call musical gestures, ought to be a high priority task in music research.

Studying musical gestures is not something new. Indeed, in previous studies, many scholars of music have pointed out that music is somehow related to gesture. However, in contrast with these earlier and often more philosophical studies, we believe that it is now a favorable moment in time to make more systematic studies of musical gestures. First and foremost, we now have at our disposal technologies that allow us to study musical gestures with great detail and precision. These technologies include various so-called motion capture technologies, which enable us to monitor gestures very precisely. From motion capture data we can extract a diverse set of features, so as to reveal various properties of gestures. Thus, these technologies open up new views on the fleeting, ephemeral sensations of gestures. Second, and in parallel with this, we now see the emergence of a conceptual apparatus that is more attuned to the primordial role of gestures and movement in human perception and cognition in general. Under the label of “embodied cognition,” we can now better understand the integration of gesture with perception and with thinking in general, including insights on how body movement is both a response to whatever we perceive and an active contribution to our perception of the world.

Given this context, we feel that the study of musical gestures, as well as the mental images of musical gestures, is indeed reshaping our conceptions of music and sound in general. The study of musical gestures appears as a core area of modern music research, with links to engineering, neuroscience, and both human and social sciences.

Yet the concept of musical gestures is not without its problems. Gesture is an often used word, and it has quite diverse connotations. We often encounter the term in various contexts such as linguistics, psychology, anthropology, aesthetics, musicology, and human–computer interaction. In these disciplines the term denotes various aspects of human movement, such as hand movements and movements of other body parts including the vocal apparatus (lips, tongue), but it also denotes semantic actions or deeds such as in “making a gesture of goodwill” by doing someone a favor. Therefore, in studying musical gestures, one of the first challenges will be that of trying to map out the various usages and meanings of this term, as well as of other related and often used terms that we may encounter in this context such as movement, motion, and action.

In fact, the diverse use of the word “gesture” can be seen as a testimony to the great importance that people attach to the idea of making some kind of recognizable action or movement. In most cases, the notion of gesture refers in some way to notions of action, which itself testifies, again, to the ubiquitous role of human movement and an embodied (rather than a disembodied “mentalesque”) engagement with our environment. Although the many significations of the word “gesture “may appear to be problematic, they are, at the same time, advantages in that they provide us with a very broad and highly interdisciplinary basis for reflecting upon what meaningful music-based interactions are all about.

The multiple uses of the word “gesture” within different disciplines and contexts are also related to the many and often very various potential approaches to its systematic study. It is our hope that this book will familiarize the reader with a broad selection of theories and methods, ranging from the more introspective and/or philosophical approaches to the more empirical and/or experimental approaches, from the qualitative to the more quantitative, and from “hardcore” measurement to various historical, aesthetic and semiotic perspectives. In the rest of this introductory chapter, we shall give a brief sketch of the various concepts and aspects of musical gestures that are presented in the ensuing chapters of this book.

2 Gesture as Body Movement

A straightforward definition of gesture is that it is a movement of part of the body, for example a hand or the head, to express an idea or meaning. In the context of musical performance, gestures are movements made by performers to control the musical instrument when playing a melodic figure, to coordinate actions among musicians (conducting gestures), or to impress an audience (for example, moving the head during a solo performance). In the context of listening to music, gestures are movements that accompany or express the activity of listening, such as tapping along with the beat, swaying, or dancing. In many circumstances, gestures are learned movements, but sometimes they are made spontaneously as they go along with the articulation of the musical idea or meaning.

2.1 Primary and Secondary Focus

It should be admitted that the above definition has a primary focus on physical movement, whereas expression and meaning appear on a secondary plane. One could say that the primary focus is on extension, namely the human body and its movement in space, whereas the secondary focus is on intention, namely that which is imagined or anticipated. However, it is hard to separate the primary focus from the secondary focus. The reason is that not all movements can be considered to be genuine gestures. In order to call a movement a genuine gesture, it is required that this movement is in some way a carrier of expression and meaning. Clearly, this second focus introduces a subjective aspect as well as a context-dependent aspect. Indeed, for a particular observer, in a particular context, movements may be conceived as having expression and meaning, while for another observer, even in the same context (but likely also in a different context), the same movements may be conceived as having no particular expression or meaning. Due to this subjective and context-dependent aspect of gestures, many researchers prefer to focus on extension, rather than on intention. Clearly, it is indeed extension, and thus movement, that can be easily measured using video recordings and all sorts of kinetic and physiological sensors, whereas intention is something that exists inside the minds of people. The latter is often vague and subject to interpretation.

2.2 Gesture as Movement, in Musical Communication

By concentrating on the primary aspect of gesture, namely movement, it is tempting to consider the whole chain of musical communication as based on movement. Indeed, bodily movements control instruments that generate movements of air particles. These movements are in turn transmitted to the listener, and are taken over by the listener’s auditory system, which, through a neuronal coupling with the listener’s motor system, sets the listener’s body in motion.

2.3 Body-Related Gestures and Sound-Related Gestures

This framework allows for an interesting distinction between body-related gestures and sound-related gestures, as can be seen in various chapters in this book. Body gestures can be described from different perspectives, such as the biomechanical constraints of the human body (Chapter 9), control movements like conducting movements (Chapter 11) or sound-producing movements (Chapter 3), as coalition signals (Chapter 7), or simply as body posture (Chapters 4, 10).

Sound-related gestures, on the other hand, can be understood as movements in sound, such as pitches going up, rhythms that have a galloping character and so on (Chapters 5, 6). Obviously these movements in sound are produced by movements of the human body (Chapter 8). Analysis of sound, in particular the movements in sound, can therefore be used as a starting point in identifying sound-related musical gestures. The whole approach entails that musical communication is fundamentally driven by movement. In particular, musical communication is steered by bodily motion, which is encoded by the player, transmitted through audio, and decoded by the listener.

2.4 Problems of Reducing Gesture to Movement

Although the notion of gesture as movement is very common in modern scientific approaches, its reduction to movement as such (also called motion) is not entirely satisfying because in many cases music-related movement as such cannot be studied without having additional knowledge of the underlying expression of meaning. Consider the movements of a listener in response to music. We can measure and extract features from these movements, but how can we be sure that such observed movements are the genuine expression of the listener’s embodied perception of music? How can we be sure that the listener is not cheating us? We can only solve this problem by considering fully the second focus of the above definition; in other words, by checking its expression and meaning in relation to music. This secondary focus introduces a number of complexities that greatly interfere with the apparently simple approach to gesture as movement.

Indeed, if music draws upon the communication of motion or movement, what then is the meaning of these movements? Are listeners capable of decoding the expression or meaning of the performer? If yes, what is the nature of these meanings? Is there a proper account of the relationship between movement, expression and meaning?

If performers use body movement to produce music, then what types of movement do they produce? Are all movements equally effective in the production of sound? What about movements such as tapping along or shaking the head? Do these body movements have a communicative value, do they facilitate sound making, or are they just ancillary, intended for show? Is there an appropriate typology of movements that relates to gestures? Is there a way to observe their distinction?

If we assume that music communicates movement, where can we find movement in sound, or what does it mean that sounds contain movement? Obviously, when we look at sound representations, such as waveforms or their corresponding spectral representations, there is no clear indication of where a gesture has started or ended. Moreover, it is not clear how the movements of air particles, ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Editors’ Preface
• Part I Gestures in Music
• Part II Gestural Significations
• Part III Gesture Generation and Control
• Contributors
• Index