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You are here: Home / Others / Using science to measure expressivity

Using science to measure expressivity

June 6, 2011 by philip copeland Leave a Comment


A fascinating video about how musicians communicate expressivity, discussed here on the website “brainpickings.”
The interplay between music and emotion, which we explored on Monday with 7 must-read books on the subject, is undeniable. But if most of us ordinary people are so powerfully affected by music, we can only imagine what that experience must be like for professional musicians. That’s exactly what behavioral neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of the excellent This Is Your Brain on Music, explores in It’s All In The Timing — a fascinating series of psychology experiments that measure how musicians experience and communicate emotion.  
 


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Comments

  1. Edward Palmer says

    June 9, 2011 at 8:02 am

     
     
     
    Toys for the tenured teachers?
    Money for “machine” manufacturers?
    A new branch for music education?
    Studios for Rent!!?
     
    Unanswered question: “What makes a human a (musical) human?”
     
    E Palmer
     
     
     
     
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  2. John Howell says

    June 8, 2011 at 2:52 pm

    Very interesting, and has the possibility of leading to additional work that might actually amount to something useful.  (And incidentally, underscores why MIDI playback by a computer never sounds musical!!)  But there is a LOT of work left to do, since not only the musical aspects but emotion itself have to be defined much more rigorously.  This experiment does not measure expressivity, it measures exactly what it set out to do–the result of varying four specific parameters of PERFORMANCE.  It has nothing to do with composition or composers, since they cannot specify those parameters within our existing system of notation.
     
    The observation that trained musicians react more specifically to those four parameters should be no surprise.  They have the vocabulary to describe and identify what they are hearing.  Just as artists have the ability to recognize and idenify more different colors, or shades of colors, because they are used to working with colors.
     
    But it’s a good start.
     
    All the best,
    John
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