Modelling Perceived Segmentation of Bodily Gestures Induced by Music

This article presents an ongoing investigation whose goal is to model perceived segmentation of music-induced bodily gestures. The investigation consists of three stages. The first stage is a database of multimodal recordings of people moving to music. The data of these recordings are video and motion-capture (acceleration and position at several points of the body). In the second stage the videos produced in the first stage are manually segmented. This is regarded as ground truth for the evaluation of the performance of an automatic gesture segmentation system developed in the third stage of the study. This system extracts kinetic features from motion-captured data. Then a novelty score is…

Exploring relations between Big Five personality traits and musical emotions embodied in spontaneous dance

We explored the hypothesis that musical emotions are embodied differentially by people according to their personality. Nine hundred and fifty two individuals completed the Big Five personality inventory. A subset of 60 participants were asked to spontaneously move to 30 short musical stimuli while being recorded with a motion-capture system. The musical stimuli were separately rated for perceived emotions. Embodied musical emotions were evaluated as the correlation between features derived from the motion-capture data and the mean ratings of perceived emotions. Correlations between embodied musical emotions and personality traits provided tentative support for our hypothesis. A series of l…

Review of New Perspectives in Music and Gesture

Segmentation boundaries in accelerometer data of arm motion induced by music : online computation and perceptual assessment

Segmentation is a cognitive process involved in the understanding of information perceived through the senses. Likewise, the automatic segmentation of data captured by sensors may be used for the identification of patterns. This study is concerned with the segmentation of dancing motion captured by accelerometry and its possible applications, such as pattern learning and recognition, or gestural control of devices. To that effect, an automatic segmentation system was formulated and tested. Two participants were asked to ‘dance with one arm’ while their motion was measured by an accelerometer. The performances were recorded on video, and manually segmented by six annotators later. The annota…

Gestural Agency in Human-Machine Musical Interaction

Musical technologies are evolving in such a way that they start to resemble the people that use them. In this vision it seems pertinent to abandon the conception of musicians as users of musical instruments in favor of machines and humans interacting to make music. Both the machine and the human can be modeled as embodied cognitive agents that comprise a network of musical gestures. These gestures are multi-modal signals that allow the agents to exert influence upon each other towards making music. This standpoint integrates traditional and novel music-making technologies, towards a better understanding of musical interaction. peerReviewed