How musicians coordinate with each other non-verbally

Toronto: A team of researchers has discovered a new technique to examine how musicians intuitively coordinate with one another during a performance, finds a new study. The findings provide new insights into how musicians synchronize their movements so that they can play exactly in time as one single unit to perform expressive music that has changes in tempo and dynamics. “Accomplishing this relies on predicting what your fellow musicians will do next so that you can plan the motor movements so as to express the same emotions in a coordinated way. If you wait to hear what your fellow musicians will do, it is too late,” said Laurel Trainor, director of the McMaster University in Canada. “Successfully performing music with a group is a highly complex endeavour,” said Trainor.

For this study, the researchers, using mathematical techniques, measured how much the movements of each musician were predicting the movements of others. Each performer was fitted with motion capture markers to track their movements while the musicians played happy or sad musical excerpts, once with musical expression, once without. The findings revealed that musicians predicted each other’s movements to a greater extent when they played with expression irrespective of whether they portrayed joy or sadness, compared to when they played with no emotion. (IANS)

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