Abstract
This article presents the preliminary results from an experiment investigating the influence of cellists’ ancillary gestures on their musical expressivity. Seven professional cellists were asked to play a score while their movements were recorded by a force platform (on which they were seated) and a 3D motion capture system for joint kinematics. Specific torso and head contributions to their global postural displacements were analyzed through the use of 4 playing conditions: (a) a normal condition without any constraints, (b) a mentally static condition where the cellists were asked to keep their posture as static as possible, (c) a physically semi-constrained condition where the cellists’ torso was attached to the back of a chair by a safety race harness, and (d) a physically fully constrained condition where the cellists wore a neck collar in addition to the race harness to limit their head movements. We here investigate the influence of these constraints on global postural features computed from the force platform data, and on fundamental acoustical features linked to musical expressivity for one cellist. The first results reveal that the cellists’ immobilization conditions give rise to different postural adaptation strategies depending on the torso-head coupling, and alter significantly the expressive intentions through changes in spectro-temporal features and rhythmical variations of the produced sounds.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Askenfelt, A., Guettler, K.: Bows and timbre-myth or reality. In: Proceedings of the International Symposium of Musical Acoustics, Perugia (2001)
Barthet, M., Kronland-Martinet, R., Ystad, S.: Improving musical expressiveness by time-varying brightness shaping. In: Kronland-Martinet, R., Ystad, S., Jensen, K. (eds.) CMMR 2007. LNCS, vol. 4969, pp. 313–336. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Cadoz, C., Wanderley, M.: Gesture-music. In: Wanderley, M., Battier, M. (eds.) Trends in Gestural Control of Music. IRCAM - Centre Pompidou, Paris (2000)
Chadefaux, D., Lecarrou, J.L., Wanderley, M.M., Fabre, B., Daudet, L.: Gestural strategies in the harp performance. Acta Acustica United Acustica 99(6), 986–996 (2013)
Chudy, M., Carrillo, A.P., Dixon, S.: On the relation between gesture, tone production and perception in classical cello performance. In: Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, vol. 19, p. 035017. Acoustical Society of America (2013)
De Poli, G., Roda, A., Vidolin, A.: Note-by-note analysis of the influence of expressive intentions and musical structure in violin performance. J. New Music Res. 27(3), 293–321 (1998)
DeAlcantera, P.: The alexander technique: a practical lesson. http://pedrodealcantara.com/practical-lesson/
Desmet, F., Nijs, L., Demey, M., Lesaffre, M., Martens, J.P., Leman, M.: Assessing a clarinet player’s performer gestures in relation to locally intended musical targets. J. New Music Res. 41(1), 31–48 (2012)
Hong, J.L.: Investigating expressive timing and dynamics in recorded cello performances. Psychol. Music 31(3), 340–352 (2003)
Kim, H.G., Moreau, N., Sikora, T.: MPEG-7 Audio and Beyond: Audio Content Indexing and Retrieval. Wiley, Hoboken (2006)
Lartillot, O., Toiviainen, P.: A matlab toolbox for musical feature extraction from audio. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Audio Effects, pp. 237–244 (2007)
Leman, M.: Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology. MIT Press, Cambridge (2008)
Peeters, G.: A large set of audio features for sound description (similarity and classification) in the cuidado project. Technical report, IRCAM (2004)
Pollard, H.F., Jansson, E.V.: A tristimulus method for the specification of musical timbre. Acta Acustica United Acustica 51(3), 162–171 (1982)
Thompson, M.R., Luck, G.: Exploring relationships between pianists’ body movements, their expressive intentions, and structural elements of the music. Musicae Sci. 16(1), 19–40 (2012)
Visi, F., Coorevits, E., Miranda, E., Leman, M.: Effects of Different Bow Stroke Styles on Body Movements of a Viola Player: An Exploratory Study. Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor (2014)
Wanderley, M.M.: Quantitative analysis of non-obvious performer gestures. In: Wachsmuth, I., Sowa, T. (eds.) GW 2001. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2298, pp. 241–253. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Wanderley, M.M., Vines, B.W., Middleton, N., McKay, C., Hatch, W.: The musical significance of clarinetists’ ancillary gestures: an exploration of the field. J. New Music Res. 34(1), 97–113 (2005)
Winold, H., Thelen, E.: Coordination and control in the bow arm movements of highly skilled cellists. Ecol. Psychol. 6(1), 1–31 (1994)
Acknowledgements
This work is partly supported by the French National Research Agency and is part of the Sonimove project (ANR-14-CE24-0018).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rozé, J. et al. (2016). Assessing the Influence of Constraints on Cellists’ Postural Displacements and Musical Expressivity. 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_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46282-0_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-46281-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-46282-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)