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Handedness in Percussion Sight-Reading

Published: 16 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of a study investigating the effects of handedness on percussionists. Handedness, which is a subcategory of the field of laterality, has a number of wide-ranging effects on human movement. Previous research has shown that more attention is diverted to the preferred-hand when the level of difficulty is increased in a given task. Furthermore, the preferred hand is relied upon to initiate a timing schedule for bimanual tapping tasks. Given the strong connection between performance-based tapping tasks and percussion performance, this study sought to test the aforementioned findings in the context of instrumental performance. In the current literature, little to no research exists on the subject of handedness in percussive performance.
With the assistance of 7 right-handed and 2 left-handed participants, the effects of handedness were observed in a motion capture facility. The participants performed a single-page sight-reading exercise. Each participant had at least one year of undergraduate training in percussion performance. The tasks were performed on a 29-inch timpani drum.
The sight-reading exercise was written to specifically challenge the participants with regards to handedness. Here, the exercise gradually changed in rhythmic complexity, using irregular and syncopated rhythm structures to complicate the participant's internal timing.
The findings of this study revealed a sharp shift in the use of the preferred and non-preferred hands in relation to beat structure. Larger beat structures, such as down-beats, commanded 84.1% usage of the preferred-hand while 16th-note subdivisions reported just 32.0%. Further observations and analysis show that the obfuscation of the down-beat with irregular rhythms disrupt the participant's timing causing a series of multi-strokes with the preferred-hand.

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  • (2023)Sticking choices in timpani sight-reading performanceFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2023.118877314Online publication date: 14-Sep-2023

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cover image ACM Other conferences
MOCO '14: Proceedings of the 2014 International Workshop on Movement and Computing
June 2014
184 pages
ISBN:9781450328142
DOI:10.1145/2617995
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • SFU: Simon Fraser University

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 June 2014

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Author Tags

  1. Handedness
  2. Motion Capture
  3. Percussion
  4. Sight-Reading

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MOCO '14

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MOCO '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 24 of 54 submissions, 44%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 85 of 185 submissions, 46%

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  • (2023)Sticking choices in timpani sight-reading performanceFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2023.118877314Online publication date: 14-Sep-2023

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