ZOOM LINK:

https://aarhusuniversity.zoom.us/j/69707641454

TITLE:

Togetherness in skilled ensemble performance: Examining the role of mutual attention in coordinating expressive body motion

ABSTRACT:

What does it mean to be together in music? Musical togetherness can be conceptualized as involving performers' shared experiences, their embodied coordination dynamics, and audience perceptions and feedback. Underlying experiences of togetherness is a complex network of cognitive processes that unfold interactively within the social and material context of the performance. My research investigates how togetherness emerges in relation to social and musical demands. My experiments with small classical ensembles have shown that musicians who can interact visually with their partner(s) interact more strongly through their expressive body motion and spend time watching each other, even though this has negligible effect on sound synchronization, which is equally precise when the musicians cannot see each other. Why, then, do performers show this tendency to engage with their co-performers visually? Visual exchanges support expressive body-based interaction between performers, which may support alignment in attentional focus. One of my recent studies with classical piano duos examined how attention directed to 1) the self versus the group and 2) the same versus different musical goals affected pianists' self-reported experiences of togetherness and expressive coordination in head motion. Another study with string quartets examined how musicians' attention and expressive body interaction fluctuated in response to playing conditions that were designed to disrupt establish social dynamics within the group. This latter study compared a student quartet with a world-class professional quartet, and also examined how the musicians' attention fluctuations related to technical, musical structural, and expressive demands of the piece they were playing. In this talk, I will present these studies and discuss how the results may lead to a better understanding of the role of mutual attention in togetherness experiences. 

BIO:

https://www.uio.no/ritmo/english/people/postdoctoral-fellows/laurabi/