Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance

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.

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.