Measuring musical engagement using expressive movement and EEG brain dynamics.

The research reported here examines the behavior and brain dynamics supporting the experience of musical engagement, defined here as the experience of consciously "entering into" the experience of music as it is heard, imagined, or performed, a condition in which the listener is fully attentive to and emotionally engaged in the flow of musical material and feeling and not attentive to extramusical stimuli or concerns. This may occur when listeners are actively involved in creatively experiencing the musical stimulus they are hearing or imagining, and also when they are shaping or helping shape the musical experience through performing, improvising, or actively modulating the sound environment to enhance their own and others' musical experience.The intent of artistic musical performance is to allow, invite, and encourage listeners to readily and fully enter into a musically engaged listening state. The musical artist must not only avoid playing notes that are physically "wrong" or out-of-place but must also create a sense in the listeners of an emotionally conducive musical "flow" or "pulse," whose importance was discussed by Manfred Clynes nearly 40 years ago (Clynes, 1977).The nature of this temporal flow is not understood, although it is intuitively experienced by musicians-as evidenced, for example, by the success of conductors who use continuous gestures to control the "pulse" of an orchestral performance, even though the notes the orchestral instruments are playing typically have abrupt onsets and physically a pulsatile rather than a smooth-flowing texture. That is, the listeners' experience of "musical flow" and continuous rhythmic pulse is created by the listeners through their musical engagement based on the stream of physical sensations produced by the musician(s)-who are also creating their own experience of musical flow as they produce the music.Clynes pointed to the flowing performance gestures of classical pianists and other musicians as expressing the continuous flow of musical feeling they are attempting to themselves experience more completely and to convey to listeners through the music they are creating. Although these gestures may have no direct effect on the sounds produced by their instrument, both performers and listeners interpret these gestures, like the flowing movements of orchestral conductors, as augmenting the affective musical experience and communication of the musicians as well as the affective musical experience of listeners.Our goal is to better understand the state of musical engagement that can arise during physically engaged musical performance. Through the experiments outlined in later text, we attempt to clarify relationships between the experience of musical emotion or affect and physical movements during states of musical engagement. The resulting conclusions about musical engagement may well have broader impact outside of cognitive neuroscience. A method for modeling brain and body dynamics accompanying musical engagement could have wide-ranging applications in fields of music and new media studies research and development, as well as broad applications to musical learning and therapy.Defining Musical EngagementOur working model of musical engagement involves listener (or musician) attention to and affective perception of the music as well as musician or "conductor" rhythmic action production, each of which is dependent on the others, although they relate to different aspects of brain and behavior. A framework for understanding affective communication through music should begin with our need and ability to read the emotional tone, reactions, and intentions of others. The psychologist Carl Meyers recorded the verbal descriptions of listeners' experience of listening to recorded excerpts of orchestral music. In his 1927 report, he described a major category of listener responses as describing perception of "human character." (Meyers, 1927).In our experiments, we used a "guided imagery" approach to suggest our "conductor" participants imagine that their "conducting" gestures, transduced into a simple point-light display, were being viewed in another room by a "deaf friend" who wanted to share in the conductors' affective experience of the music they were hearing. …