Dirk Moelants

Activating and relaxing music entrains the speed of beat synchronized walking

Inspired by a theory of embodied music cognition, we investigate whether music can entrain the speed of beat synchronized walking. If human walking is in synchrony with the beat and all musical stimuli have the same duration and the same tempo, then differences in walking speed can only be the result of music-induced differences in stride length, thus reflecting the vigor or physical strength of the movement. Participants walked in an open field in synchrony with the beat of 52 different musical stimuli all having a tempo of 130 beats per minute and a meter of 4 beats. The walking speed was measured as the walked distance during a time interval of 30 seconds. The results reveal that some music is ‘activating’ in the sense that it increases the speed, and some music is ‘relaxing’ in the sense that it decreases the speed, compared to the spontaneous walked speed in response to metronome stimuli. Participants are consistent in their observation of qualitative differences between the relaxing and activating musical stimuli. Using regression analysis, it was possible to set up a predictive model using only four sonic features that explain 60% of the variance. The sonic features capture variation in loudness and pitch patterns at periods of three, four and six beats, suggesting that expressive patterns in music are responsible for the effect. The mechanism may be attributed to an attentional shift, a subliminal audio-motor entrainment mechanism, or an arousal effect, but further study is needed to figure this out. Overall, the study supports the hypothesis that recurrent patterns of fluctuation affecting the binary meter strength of the music may entrain the vigor of the movement. The study opens up new perspectives for understanding the relationship between entrainment and expressiveness, with the possibility to develop applications that can be used in domains such as sports and physical rehabilitation.

Prediction of Musical Affect Using a Combination of Acoustic Structural Cues

This study explores whether musical affect attribution can be predicted by a linear combination of acoustical structural cues. To that aim, a database of sixty musical audio excerpts was compiled and analyzed at three levels: judgments of affective content by subjects; judgments of structural content by musicological experts (i.e., “manual structural cues”), and extraction of structural content by an auditory-based computer algorithm (called: acoustical structural cues). In Study I, an affect space was constructed with Valence (gay-sad), Activity (tender-bold) and Interest (exciting-boring) as the main dimensions, using the responses of a hundred subjects. In Study II manual and acoustical structural cues were analyzed and compared. Manual structural cues such as loudness and articulation could be accounted for in terms of a combination of acoustical structural cues. In Study III, the subjective responses of eight individual subjects were analyzed using the affect space obtained in Study I, and modeled in terms of the structural cues obtained in Study II, using linear regression modeling. This worked better for the Activity dimension than for the Valence dimension, while the Interest dimension could not be accounted for. Overall, manual structural cues worked better than acoustical structural cues. In a final assessment study, a selected set of acoustical structural cues was used for building prediction models. The results indicate that musical affect attribution can partly be predicted using a combination of acoustical structural cues. Future research may focus on non-linear approaches, elaboration of dataset and subjects, and refinement of acoustical structural cue extraction.

Access to ethnic music: Advances and perspectives in content-based music information retrieval

Access to digital music collections is nowadays facilitated by content-based methods that allow the retrieval of music on the basis of intrinsic properties of audio, in addition to advanced metadata processing. However, access to ethnic music remains problematic, as this music does not always correspond to the Western concepts that underlie the currently available content-based methods. In this paper, we examine the literature on access to ethnic music, while focusing on the reasons why the existing techniques fail or fall short of expectations and what can be done about it. The paper considers a review of the work on signals and feature extraction, on symbolic and semantic information processing, and on metadata and context tools. An overview is given of several European ethnic music archives and related ongoing research projects. Problems are highlighted and suggestions of the ways in which to improve access to ethnic music collections are given.

Concepts, Technology, and Assessment of the Social Music Game "Sync-in-Team'

Music offers an excellent domain in which advanced forms of non-verbal communication can be explored. The first part of this paper introduces the research concepts behind the idea of a social interactive music game, which is based on the no-tions of ‘embodiment’ and ‘mediation technology’. The second part reviews the development of the ‘Sync-in-Team’ game, and its assessment in four different settings, including noisy eco-logical settings. The third part reviews the technological backbone of the game, and the fourth part discusses further developments. A user-oriented approach, based on concepts from embodied music cognition, may offer a valid contribution to the development of novel music-driven games that foster the sense for social interaction, body movement, collaboration, and competition.

Does Social Interaction Activate Music Listeners

Over the last years, embodiment has gained a lot of interest in the field of music research. Researchers began to focus on the study of body movements and gestures in relationship with music. In the study presented here, we empirically quantified the impact of social interaction on movements made by groups of subjects listening and moving to music. Both children (average age 9) and adolescents (average age 16) were tested. The methodology was based on motion capturing using wireless Wii Nintendo Remote sensors, and subsequent statistical analysis. Participants were asked to move along with the beat of the music in two conditions: Individual, without social contact, and in groups of four, encouraging social interaction. Data analysis shows that the influence of the social environment has an effect that can be measured and quantified. In general, the social context stimulates participants to move more intensively to the music. Furthermore, adolescent participants even show a significantly improved synchronization with the beat of the music in the social condition, illustrating social facilitation.

Perception and performance of aksak metres

Abstract In this paper different aspects of the fast odd metres found in the Balkan (aksak) are studied. Comparing their temporal characteristics with thresholds of rhythm perception, it is shown that the basic regular unit is too fast to serve as the pulse. Thus the pulse moves to the (unequal) units of 2, 3 or 4 beats. This gives aksak metres a special position within an overall typology of asymmetric metre. Two sets of data will be analysed to give more details on the actual timing in performance: a set of traditional Bulgarian tunes and performances of Bartók piano pieces by four different players. Despite the similarity of global tempo and metre, differences in the treatment of tempo were found between both sets, which can be explained by the different performance contexts. In both sets, specific patterns of metric microstructure were found that can give us more information about the actual metric interpretation and clear effects of the musical structure on both the tempo and the metric microstructure are shown. All together, it seems that aksak metres are closer to regular metres than commonly thought.

An Embodied Approach to Testing Musical Empathy in Participants With an Autism Spectrum Disorder

We present an empirical and qualitative study testing musical empathic ability in participants with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Four experiments requiring an increasing level of empathy with music, from synchronization, and attuning to emotional empathy, were carried out, using kinematic devices for measuring embodied listening responses and a verbal emotion attribution task. Results suggest that people with ASD have a corporeal understanding of the affective features of music, since they are able to mirror structural and even affective features of the music into corporeal articulations. However, this corporeal understanding does not give them a straightforward access to the emotional content of the music. The participants with ASD seemed to rely on disembodied cognitive processes to attribute affects to music.

Similarity between multi-valued thesaurus attributes: theory and application in multimedia systems

In this paper, the theoretical aspects of calculating the similarity between sets, and its generalizations multisets, fuzzy sets and fuzzy multisets, is presented. Afterwards, this theory is applied to enhance the facilities for accessing a multimedia system, namely when searching for correspondence between multi-valued attributes, which are coupled with a thesaurus. Furthermore, to allow flexibility in this search, thesauri with similarities defined between the thesaurus terms are considered. As a possible application, the DEKKMMA project is introduced, a project about an audio archive of African music.

A Framework for the Subsymbolic Description of Meter

In this paper the concept of meter is investigated, taking into account elements of perception and performance. Considerable problems with the traditional theories lead to a broadened definition of meter as the temporal framework of music. A descriptive method for meter based on this definition is proposed, it consists of three main levels: essential beat patterns, metric hierarchies (meter in strict sense) and metric microstructure. The emphasis is on the importance of periodic beats and microstructure and of their combination to reach a complete description of meter. Finally the significance of interpretational elements in the perception of meter is discussed, stressing the need to start from performed music in order to obtain a correct image of the meter in a particular piece.

A framework for flexible querying and mining of musical audio archives

In this paper the outline of a framework for the handling of flexible querying and mining of musical audio archives is presented. This framework has been designed within the scope of the DEKKMMA-project, which aims to build a digital musical audio archive for the ethnomusicological department of the Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa. This museum holds one of the largest and world wide most important collections of music from Central Africa. Beside the digitizing and recording aspects, efficient access facilities for both specialized and nonspecialized users are required. In order to achieve this, the framework supports and integrates flexible querying, classification and object comparison mechanisms.