Capturing the alignment between the movements of musicians and listeners with Dr. Alexander Demos

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Host Finn Upham recommends “How Music Moves Us: Entraining to Musicians’ Movements” by Alexander Demos and Roger Chaffin, published in Music Perception, 2017. They interview Dr Demos about this study and adjacent issues.

Note: This interview goes fairly deep into the challenges of time series data analysis. Feel free to use the time stamps listed in the show notes to skip ahead if this is not your cup of tea.

Time Stamps

• [0:00:10] Intro to article and Alex
• [0:03:20] Design of Air Conducting experiment
• [0:11:15] Capturing movements of performers and listeners
• [0:15:40] Assessing alignment between motion time series
• [0:25:26] Non-linearity in these time series
• [0:31:18] False negatives and intermittent alignment
• [0:38:32] Theories of Music and Ancillary motion
• [0:45:04] Closing Summary and Implications  

Show notes

• Recommended article:
  • Demos, A. P., & Chaffin, R. (2018). How Music Moves Us: Entraining to Musicians’ Movements. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 35(4), 405-424.  (pdf)
• Interviewee: Dr. Alexander Demos, Clinical assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (website)
• Some publications cited in the discussion:
  • Schreiber, T., & Schmitz, A. (1996). Improved surrogate data for nonlinearity tests. Physical Review Letters, 77(4), 635–638.
  • Cook, N. (2013). Beyond the score: Music as performance. Oxford University Press.
  • Theiler, J., Eubank, S., Longtin, A., Galdrikian, B. & Farmer, J. D. (1992). Testing for nonlinearity in time series: The method of surrogate data. Physica D, 58, 77–94.
  • Dean, R. T., Bailes, F., & Dunsmuir, W. T. (2014). Time series analysis of real-time music perception: Approaches to the assessment of individual and expertise differences in perception of expressed affect. Journal of Mathematics and Music, 8(3), 183-205.
  • Wanderley, M. M., Vines, B. W., Middleton, N., Mckay, C., & Hatch, W. (2005). The musical significance of clarinetists’ ancillary gestures: An exploration of the field. Journal of New Music Research, 34(1), 97–113. DOI: 10.1080/092982105 00124208

Credits

The So Strangely Podcast is produced by Finn Upham, 2019. The closing music includes a sample of Diana Deutsch’s Speech-Song Illusion sound demo 1.