Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance
Lead Research Organisation:
Durham University
Department Name: Music
Abstract
Group music-making is a distinctive mode of human social interaction: it is a widespread activity that showcases the remarkable capacity for precision and creativity demonstrated in the coordination of rhythmic behaviour between individuals. Such coordination entails interpersonal entrainment, a process whereby two or more individuals interact with each other in a manner supporting the synchronization of body movements and musical sounds. Although musical entrainment is prevalent across the world's cultures, the way in which it is manifested appears to vary as a function of differences in social, ritual and musical conventions. A better understanding of the process of interpersonal entrainment and its cultural variation is therefore imperative. The main objective of this project is to investigate key aspects of interpersonal musical entrainment in a comparative study of a variety of cultural settings; it does so through the establishment of an international and interdisciplinary team, and by creating and analyzing a shared corpus of prepared and annotated performance data.
Understanding musical entrainment requires contributions from several disciplines, in particular ethnomusicology, music cognition and computing. This project combines perspectives from each of these disciplines: it focuses on better understanding of culture- and genre- specific variations in interpersonal musical entrainment, addressed through both objective measures of entrainment and investigation of subjective perceptions of this coordination, interpreted in the light of ethnographic information about the functions and effects of the music and local aesthetic values.
This ground-breaking, international and interdisciplinary project integrates three complementary approaches. First, we will apply and extend existing methods for the empirical study of interpersonal coordination in music-making. We will emphasize methods for analysing audio and video recordings, in order to carry out comparative analyses from several contrasting cultural settings - including India, Mali, Tunisia, Uruguay and Cuba - rather than being limited to laboratory studies. Secondly, we will conduct a series of experiments to measure listeners' perceptions and judgements of temporal coordination in recorded music extracts. The aim here is to measure both observers' sensitivity to variations in coordination, and their preferences, and to explore how these measures vary between cultures. Finally, we will explore all of these measures in relation to qualitative culture-specific factors: for instance, differences in preference for close coordination as opposed to individual freedom in group activities. The integration of these research strands will give us a much clearer picture of the shared and culturally-varying components of interpersonal musical entrainment.
This collaborative research model is essential if we are to make properly informed comparative studies of a number of contrasting music cultures, and do so with a firm grounding in ethnomusicology, music cognition and the latest computational techniques in video and time series analysis. The aim is both to achieve a step-change in our understanding of musical entrainment - and therefore of social interaction and interpersonal coordination in general - and, by doing so, to establish long-term, international and interdisciplinary research collaborations bridging ethnomusicology, music cognition and computing.
Understanding musical entrainment requires contributions from several disciplines, in particular ethnomusicology, music cognition and computing. This project combines perspectives from each of these disciplines: it focuses on better understanding of culture- and genre- specific variations in interpersonal musical entrainment, addressed through both objective measures of entrainment and investigation of subjective perceptions of this coordination, interpreted in the light of ethnographic information about the functions and effects of the music and local aesthetic values.
This ground-breaking, international and interdisciplinary project integrates three complementary approaches. First, we will apply and extend existing methods for the empirical study of interpersonal coordination in music-making. We will emphasize methods for analysing audio and video recordings, in order to carry out comparative analyses from several contrasting cultural settings - including India, Mali, Tunisia, Uruguay and Cuba - rather than being limited to laboratory studies. Secondly, we will conduct a series of experiments to measure listeners' perceptions and judgements of temporal coordination in recorded music extracts. The aim here is to measure both observers' sensitivity to variations in coordination, and their preferences, and to explore how these measures vary between cultures. Finally, we will explore all of these measures in relation to qualitative culture-specific factors: for instance, differences in preference for close coordination as opposed to individual freedom in group activities. The integration of these research strands will give us a much clearer picture of the shared and culturally-varying components of interpersonal musical entrainment.
This collaborative research model is essential if we are to make properly informed comparative studies of a number of contrasting music cultures, and do so with a firm grounding in ethnomusicology, music cognition and the latest computational techniques in video and time series analysis. The aim is both to achieve a step-change in our understanding of musical entrainment - and therefore of social interaction and interpersonal coordination in general - and, by doing so, to establish long-term, international and interdisciplinary research collaborations bridging ethnomusicology, music cognition and computing.
Planned Impact
The main groups of beneficiaries we see at this stage are as follows:
1. The general public and selected event organisers and media organisations concerned with popular science. By engaging members of the public with important questions such as "How do people play music together?" with the help of illustrations and interactive games and apps, we will communicate messages such as:
a) Playing music together is possible thanks to a range of capacities shared by almost all humans, many of which are unique to humanity
b) Whether music sounds good, and feels good to the players, depends on a range of social and personal factors - and these factors can vary, so what sounds good depends on where you come from
We will engage with suitable venues, events and media bodies, and through them with members of the public with an interest in popular science/ psychology and music.
2. Academics and companies interested in developing interactive games and apps applying entrainment research. Such apps would be designed to develop music training and creation tools that facilitate, or draw inspiration from, kinds of interpersonal coordination that may be unfamiliar in a particular cultural context.
Another possible application is to diagnose coordination problems such as deficits in the ability to follow a beat (and the underlying issues that may cause such deficits) and to train users to counteract these difficulties. The main messages to get across to these stakeholders are:
a) We know that the capacity to follow a beat is important and that training clinical populations to move to a musical beat can help people overcome a variety of debilitating conditions (e.g., associated with stroke and Parkinson's disease). However, the variety of ways in which people can coordinate their actions needs to be better understood as this can potentially open up a wider range of clinical applications, e.g. therapy and rehabilitation systems for autistic children and for children suffering from cognitive and/or motoric disabilities.
b) In the field of music training and creation tools, we need to communicate clearly the underlying dynamics of musical coordination, which will open up many new possibilities: for instance, music creation tools that do not simply control beat and tempo but allow virtual rhythmic 'agents', including robots, to interact in controllable ways.
We will present our work to academics and software designers working in these fields, with the aim of stimulating this kind of development.
In both cases, part of our engagement strategy will be to develop simple entrainment apps (e.g. games that encourage players to perform musical tasks in time with one another and give visual feedback on performance). Engagement activity will take place in the UK, Australia and Italy.
1. The general public and selected event organisers and media organisations concerned with popular science. By engaging members of the public with important questions such as "How do people play music together?" with the help of illustrations and interactive games and apps, we will communicate messages such as:
a) Playing music together is possible thanks to a range of capacities shared by almost all humans, many of which are unique to humanity
b) Whether music sounds good, and feels good to the players, depends on a range of social and personal factors - and these factors can vary, so what sounds good depends on where you come from
We will engage with suitable venues, events and media bodies, and through them with members of the public with an interest in popular science/ psychology and music.
2. Academics and companies interested in developing interactive games and apps applying entrainment research. Such apps would be designed to develop music training and creation tools that facilitate, or draw inspiration from, kinds of interpersonal coordination that may be unfamiliar in a particular cultural context.
Another possible application is to diagnose coordination problems such as deficits in the ability to follow a beat (and the underlying issues that may cause such deficits) and to train users to counteract these difficulties. The main messages to get across to these stakeholders are:
a) We know that the capacity to follow a beat is important and that training clinical populations to move to a musical beat can help people overcome a variety of debilitating conditions (e.g., associated with stroke and Parkinson's disease). However, the variety of ways in which people can coordinate their actions needs to be better understood as this can potentially open up a wider range of clinical applications, e.g. therapy and rehabilitation systems for autistic children and for children suffering from cognitive and/or motoric disabilities.
b) In the field of music training and creation tools, we need to communicate clearly the underlying dynamics of musical coordination, which will open up many new possibilities: for instance, music creation tools that do not simply control beat and tempo but allow virtual rhythmic 'agents', including robots, to interact in controllable ways.
We will present our work to academics and software designers working in these fields, with the aim of stimulating this kind of development.
In both cases, part of our engagement strategy will be to develop simple entrainment apps (e.g. games that encourage players to perform musical tasks in time with one another and give visual feedback on performance). Engagement activity will take place in the UK, Australia and Italy.
Organisations
Publications
Lameira AR
(2019)
Coupled whole-body rhythmic entrainment between two chimpanzees.
in Scientific reports
Jakubowski K
(2022)
Aesthetics of musical timing: Culture and expertise affect preferences for isochrony but not synchrony
in Cognition
Jakubowski K
(2020)
Multimodal perception of interpersonal synchrony: Evidence from global and continuous ratings of improvised musical duo performances.
in Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain
Jakubowski K
(2017)
Extracting Coarse Body Movements from Video in Music Performance: A Comparison of Automated Computer Vision Techniques with Motion Capture Data
in Frontiers in Digital Humanities
Jacoby N
(2020)
Cross-Cultural Work in Music Cognition: Challenges, Insights, and Recommendations.
in Music perception
Eerola T
(2018)
Shared periodic performer movements coordinate interactions in duo improvisations.
in Royal Society open science
Clayton M
(2020)
Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance
in Music Perception
Clayton M
(2021)
The Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance Data Collection
in Empirical Musicology Review
Description | We have developed robust methods for (a) analysing synchronisation from audio recordings, (b) extracting movement information from video recordings of musical performances and (c) analysing that movement data to provide evidence of interpersonal coordination and its relationship to musical structure. We have completed analyses using these methods, one comparing six diverse genres of music (including North Indian classical and Malian Jembe), and the other focusing in detail on our Indian corpus. We have also conducted two kinds of experiments that will allow us to investigate listeners' sensitivity to variations in the way individuals synchronise their actions when playing music, the analysis of which is ongoing. In theoretical terms, having distinguished different timescales and modalities of interpersonal entrainment we have been able to build a new theoretical model of interpersonal musical entrainment. This model is the first attempt to connect different time scales and levels of description, from milliseconds to hours and from the neurological to the cultural. new research directions are developing from this theoretical and methodological breakthrough. |
Exploitation Route | We are actively disseminating our findings and methods to other scholars as we progress. We are also developing ways of engaging the public, for example by developing school teaching materials related to our research and reporting our results through the national media. |
Sectors | Creative Economy Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Education Leisure Activities including Sports Recreation and Tourism Culture Heritage Museums and Collections |
URL | https://musicscience.net/projects/iemp/ |
Description | Outcomes of this project have been presented to the public in the Durham Schools Science Festival and Sydney Science Festival. Media engagements include two radio broadcasts: one on BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking festival, for which we were commissioned to carry out a side project with a string quartet, and BBC World Service documentary The History of Rhythm (presented by Dame Evelyn Glennie). |
First Year Of Impact | 2017 |
Sector | Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
Impact Types | Cultural Societal |
Description | (EnTimeMent) - EnTimeMent - ENtrainment and synchronization at multiple TIME scales in the MENTal foundations of expressive gesture |
Amount | € 4,206,385 (EUR) |
Funding ID | 824160 |
Organisation | European Commission |
Sector | Public |
Country | European Union (EU) |
Start | 01/2019 |
End | 12/2022 |
Title | Software patches |
Description | Patches for the Eyesweb software environment designed to allow extraction of movement information from video recordings of music performances. |
Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
Year Produced | 2017 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Impact | ONgoing research into interpersonal coordination in the UK, Australia, Italy and other countries. |
Title | IEMP MJ |
Description | A collection of audio and video recordings, and associated annotations, of malian jembe music, originally recorded by Rainer Polak. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2018 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Impact | The recordings accompany published analyses and are available to other researchers to replicate our results or attempt other approaches. |
URL | https://osf.io/m652x/ |
Title | IEMP NIR |
Description | A published collection of audio and video recordings and associated annotations, focusing on North Indian raga music. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2018 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Impact | These recording accompany published analyses and allow other researchers to explore the same materials and replicate our results, or apply different approaches. |
URL | https://osf.io/ks325/ |
Title | Interactions in duo improvisations (data) |
Description | Data employed in the preparation to two major papers has been publicly released alongside those papers via the Edinburgh University data share portal and UK Data Service Reshare. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2017 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Impact | Analytical data is available to colleagues to reanalyse or check our findings. |
URL | https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=852847&type=Data%20catalogue |
Title | String Quartet recordings |
Description | Audiovisual and biosignal recordings of a string quartet recorded on 26th February 2018, made in collaboration with BBC Radio 3. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2018 |
Provided To Others? | No |
Impact | We expect to release a subset of these recordings in due course, once they have been organised and analysed. |
Description | Contribution to BBC Radio 3 Music Matters |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Media (as a channel to the public) |
Results and Impact | Team members carried out research commissioned by BBC Radio 3, and reported on the results live on Music Matters, part of the Free Thinking festival, broadcast live from the Sage Gateshead on 10th March 2018. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09vf6q6 |
Description | Contribution to BBC World Service Radio documentary, The History of Rhythm |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Media (as a channel to the public) |
Results and Impact | Interview with BBC World Service which was used extensively in a radio documentary introduced by Dame Evelyn Glennie. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
URL | https://musicscience.net/projects/iemp/what-is-musical-entrainment/ |
Description | Durham Schools Science Festival |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Schools |
Results and Impact | We led sessions with groups of secondary school children at the Science Festival over three days in March 2017. We engaged with approximately 200 students and their teachers and received positive feedback about the experience. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
URL | https://www.dur.ac.uk/science.outreach/sciencefestival/ |
Description | Genoa Science Festival |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Schools |
Results and Impact | We presented activities related to rhythm and interaction at the festival on 25-26 Oct 2018. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | http://www.festivalscienza.eu/site/en/home.html |
Description | Primary School Workshops |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Schools |
Results and Impact | We carried out a series of primary school workshops introducing activities related to our research on rhythm and interaction. A web page outlines the approach taken. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | https://musicscience.net/resources/rhythm-activities-for-primary-school/ |
Description | Sydney Science Festival |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Schools |
Results and Impact | We presented activities relating to rhythm and interaction at the festival on 10 August 2018. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | https://sydneyscience.com.au/2018/ |