Shaping music in performance

(Daniel Leech-Wilkinson – King’s College London)

Questionnaire for expert performers

Are you an experienced musical performer of professional or near-professional standards?

Can you spare 30 minutes of your time to help us with our research?

We are researching the ways in which experienced performers use the idea of 'shape' when thinking about or performing music (or don't use it, as the case may be). We'd like to gain an initial idea of performers' views through an online questionnaire, and we'd be extremely grateful if you could spare some time to reply to it. We need as many views as possible, from the widest variety of expert performers. Everything you say will be kept absolutely confidential and will be made anonymous as part of the data collection process.

Please click on the link below, which will provide you with more information and take you on to the survey.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/music_and_shape_questionnaire

Project Summary

The notion that music has or takes shape is widely shared across time and culture. Performers in rehearsal or teaching commonly use metaphors of shape to explain the kinds of effects they wish to produce. There is an obvious relationship to the process through which performers shape sounds with their bodies as they play, gestures that may be both executive and expressive, to the written representation of music (in Western cultures), and above all to the shaping of sound through adjustments in loudness, timing and frequency, studied under CHARM in terms of ‘expressive gesture’. The experience is so common that it seems likely to play a fundamental role in musical creativity, yet it has been little studied.

This project offers two converging approaches towards a more exact understanding: 1) documenting and analysing performers’ reported experiences of the way music ‘takes shape’, and the ways in which a sense of shape influences detailed decision-making in performance; and 2) experimental and/or observational studies testing and refining the data generated under 1) which may use recorded musical performances and may extend into computer modelling.

The project team will design and conduct interviews with a substantial number of participants drawn from professional performers (focusing on a representative selection of instruments - including voice - and on conductors), as well as from teachers and students. Participants will be studied through interviews and questionnaires in order to classify and describe the perceptions of music as shaped. Follow-up studies will be designed to answer specific questions arising from the results of the interviews.

Two postdoctoral research assistantships and a PhD studentship are associated with this project. The first RA, Helen Daynes, will be working at the interface between psychology and sociology to investigate musicians’ perceptions of music as shape though interviews, questionnaires and perceptual experiments using both recordings and live performance. The second RA, to be appointed during 2010 and to work for 18 months from January 2011, will explore further aspects of the perception of shape in music in the light of the first Research Assistant’s emerging findings. A research studentship, funded by King’s College London, will run from October 2010, exploring an aspect of the project in additional depth.

Four project workshops will pool experience from music psychologists and audio software engineers with related expertise, and gather feedback.

The project outputs will be a) at least one major article and b) a collection of essays which will be the output of the project workshops and will include a chapter co-authored by Helen Daynes and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson.