Action-sound : developing methods and tools to study music-related body movement

Abstract

Body movement is integral to both performance and perception of music, and this dissertation suggests that we also think about music as movement. Based on ideas of embodied music cognition, it is argued that ecological knowledge of action-sound couplings guide our experience of music, both in perception and performance. Then follows a taxonomy of music-related body movements, before various observation studies of perceiver’s music-movement correspondences are presented. Knowledge from the observation studies was used in the exploration of artificial action-sound relationships through the development of various prototype music controllers. The last part of the dissertation presents tools and methods that have been developed throughout the project, including the Musical Gestures Toolbox; techniques for creating motion history images and motiongrams of video material; and development of the Gesture Description Interchange Format (GDIF) for streaming and storing music-related movement data. These tools may be seen as an answer to many of the research questions posed in the dissertation, and have facilitated the analysis of music-related movement and creation of artificial action-sound relationships in the project.<br><br>

The zip-file contains support material for the dissertation, including sound and video examples, software, and source code.