Motion analysis of clarinet performers

Abstract

Musical expressiveness is a concept that is difficult to formalise by objective data and its analysis usually relies on some sort of subjective evaluation. Today there is a growing interest in methods and cues used to extract, quantify, analyse and synthesise these expressive intentions. This have been done mainly through the audio analysis of music performances, identifying the acoustical parameters capable of describing their expressive content. This study expands acoustical analysis methods for investigating musicians expressive intentions, incorporating information about their body movements during musical performances. It presents a method to define and analyse the physical gestures executed by the musicians while playing their instruments, and to extract motion parameters that can be objectively related to their expressive intentions and to the musical structure. The gesture consistency of 13 clarinetists is evaluated during several performances, establishing an objective relation between their expressive gestural patterns and the music structure of two selected excerpts, by Mozart and Brahms. A method is defined to represent, segment and analyse the patterns of recurrence on motion data during musical performances. Recurrent physical gestures were extracted during clarinet performances and analysed based on gestural features, comparing different musicians, musical passages and experimental conditions. Results indicate recurrent sequences of clarinet gestures in regions of the excerpts that were shown to be related to key musical moments. A corresponding analysis is conducted over the acoustical data, searching for related parametrical patterns that could validate the results of the motion analysis. The information obtained can be used to define an integrated method to parametrise and quantify the expressive intentions of musicians. This method could be incorporated to musical synthesis, recognition, analysis and teaching systems, or used in theoretical studies in musicology, human cognition and physiology, ultimately defining a musical meaning for the physical gestures of musicians during their performances.