Shaping music in performance
Project overview | Performers' perspectives | Representations | Visualisations | Mechanisms |
Recruitment for current studies | Workshops | Music and Shape conference
Project overview
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 observational studies exploring listener-responses to musical sounds through gesture and visualisation.
The project team is working 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 are being studied through interviews and questionnaires in order to classify and describe the perceptions of music as shaped. Follow-up studies are being designed which will answer specific questions arising from the results of the interviews.
Two postdoctoral research fellows and a PhD studentship are associated with this project. The first Reseach Fellow, Helen Prior,
is working at the interface between psychology and sociology to investigate performers' perspectives of music as shape though interviews, questionnaires and perceptual experiments using both recordings and live performance. The second Research Fellow, Dan Tidhar, is using computational visualisations of musical sound to explore listeners' responses to music as shaped. A research studentship, funded by King's College London, is held by Mats Küssner, who, together with CMPCP Associate Nicolas Gold (UCL), is exploring representations of shape and other aspects of the project in additional depth. Alongside the empirical work, mechanisms underlying a sense of music as shaped are being theorised by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, project director, currently drawing in particular on the work of Daniel Stern (on the shape of experience) and Mark Johnson (on embodiment).
Four project workshops pool experience from music psychologists and audio software engineers with related expertise, and gather feedback.
The project outputs will be a) at least three articles and b) a collection of essays edited by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Helen Prior.
Recent outputs
Prior, H. M. (2010). Creating meaning in musical performance: the relevance of musical shape.
Poster presented at the Music of Language, Language of Music BPS Seminar 2: Entrainment and Meaning
Prior, H. M. (2011). Links between music and shape: style-specific; language-specific; or universal? Topics in Musical Universals: 1st International Colloquium. (Paper to be published within the conference proceedings)
Prior, H. M. (2011). Report for questionnaire participants
Interested in participating in the Shaping music as performance project? Click here to learn more.
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Shaping
music in 
performance