Ways of Knowing the Body, Bodily Ways of Knowing

[1] The impulse to include the body in music analysis is not particularly new, even within the modern field of music theory. Sixteen years ago, the lead Journal of Music Theory article by Andrew Mead (1999) advocated for "Bodily Hearing," and since that time, essay collections edited by John Rink (2002) and the two Music and Gesture volumes edited by Anthony Gritten and Elaine King (2006 and 2011) have contained contributions by notable self-identified music theorists, whose focus is not just metaphorical musical gesture, but physical gesture as well.[2] Not that the historical discipline has ever entirely ignored the body's role in producing music--after all, the Greek lichanos (index finger) is used in early treatises to denote the second-highest position in tetrachords, the term drawn from the physical means by which these scale-steps were executed on a 7-stringed lyre. But some strands of theorizing or analyzing can be seen as ignoring the intuition or common-sense tenet that any "beholder" of music gleans a great quantity of information from even cursory attention to human movement. Consider the fifteen dots moving in two dimensions that comprise the Biomotion lab's "Walker" demo.[3] We can instantly identify the basic action taking place; by manipulating the sliders at the upper left of the demo we can alter the dots' movements in ways that allow the viewer to infer more specific physical attributes, gender, and even emotional states. For example, if we move the sliders to the extreme positions of Male, Heavy, Relaxed, and Happy, we may recognize the gait of a large fellow who just gave a well-received presentation to the Society for Music Theory, and who is feeling pretty good about himself.[4] Thus, even if we avoid taking account of the performing body for a particular analytical goal or in a particular analytical context, the body must be considered in order to make the avoidance explicit and justified. In most cases, however, analysis will benefit from integrating the body in precise ways; in this short essay I advocate for just that, by reviewing two current methods for exploring the music-body pairing.[5] I begin with a technique that does not engage with visible bodies in motion per se, but that focuses on the artifacts of those bodies in the form of precise audio timings. A recent refinement of this general approach appears in Mitch Ohriner's 2012 Music Theory Online article on grouping hierarchy in Chopin's mazurkas (Example 1).[6] Ohriner uses these data as evidence for differing conceptions of phrase structure on the part of the two performers. The fourth measure shown in the example is treated by Frederic Chiu as a mid-phrase slowing of the melodic rhythm, but with the potential phrase break undercut as Chiu accelerates the underlying pulse. By contrast, Vladimir Ashkenazy realizes the melody's boundary-creating potential by emphasizing the slower melodic durations with a simultaneous slowing of the underlying pulse. It is a compelling example of a theorist/analyst treating performances themselves as analyses of a work, and in the present context we may leap to a logical next question: exactly what (gestural) means did the performers use to express these differing (musical) conceptions? Did their gestures actually differ? Does it matter if their gestures differed?[7] A leading technique of recording physical gesture visually for analysis purposes is called Motion Capture (or MoCap; cf. Menache 2010, especially Chapter 1). This technology allows for the precise recording and measurement of movement in three dimensions. It has become indispensable to the motion picture and animation industries, and even at a medium-sized state university such as Texas Tech University there are currently four motion capture installations spread across different academic divisions--Psychology, Kinesiology & Sport Management, Mechanical Engineering, and the Library Informatics Media Lab--none, notably, located in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. …