Shared Periodic Performer Movements Coordinate Interactions in Duo Improvisations

Eerola, T.; Jakubowski, K.; Moran, N.; Keller, P.; Clayton, M.

Abstract

Human interaction involves the exchange of temporally coordinated, multimodal cues. Our work focused on interaction in the visual domain, using music performance as a case for analysis due to its temporally diverse and hierarchical structures. We made use of two improvising duo datasets—(i) performances of a jazz standard with a regular pulse and (ii) non-pulsed, free improvizations—to investigate whether human judgements of moments of interaction between co-performers are influenced by body movement coordination at multiple timescales. Bouts of interaction in the performances were manually annotated by experts and the performers’ movements were quantified using computer vision techniques. The annotated interaction bouts were then predicted using several quantitative movement and audio features. Over 80% of the interaction bouts were successfully predicted by a broadband measure of the energy of the cross-wavelet transform of the co-performers’ movements in non-pulsed duos. A more complex model, with multiple predictors that captured more specific, interacting features of the movements, was needed to explain a significant amount of variance in the pulsed duos. The methods developed here have key implications for future work on measuring visual coordination in musical ensemble performances, and can be easily adapted to other musical contexts, ensemble types and traditions.

Citation

Eerola, T., Jakubowski, K., Moran, N., Keller, P., & Clayton, M. (2018). Shared Periodic Performer Movements Coordinate Interactions in Duo Improvisations. Royal Society Open Science, 5(2), Article 171520. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171520

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 16, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Feb 21, 2018
• Publication Date: Feb 21, 2018
• Deposit Date: Jan 29, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 21, 2018
• Journal: Royal Society Open Science
• Electronic ISSN: 2054-5703
• Publisher: The Royal Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 5
• Issue: 2
• Article Number: 171520
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171520
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1367571