Temporal guidance of musicians' performance movement is an acquired skill

Exp Brain Res (2013) 226:221230 DOI 10.1007/s00221-013-3427-2

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Temporal guidance of musicians performance movement is an acquired skill

M. W. M. Rodger S. OModhrain C. M. Craig

Received: 19 June 2012 / Accepted: 18 January 2013 / Published online: 8 February 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013

Keywords Music performance Skill acquisition Tau Theory Temporal control of movement

Introduction

Nearly all actions require the skillful control of movement prospectively through time to realize their goals, whether these are interceptive (e.g., catching a ball), locomotive (e.g., timing steps in a triple jump), or expressive (e.g., ballet dance). Expressive musical performance is among the most skillful activities that humans are able to achieve. Hundreds of hours of practice are required to master the ne-grain motor control necessary to produce an aesthetically satisfying sequence of sounds (Sloboda 1996). However, it is not enough to sound the correct notes in the right order; in addition, the timing and temporal unfolding of sequences of notes must be carefully controlled to accomplish an expressive, engaging musical performance (Palmer 1989; Clarke 1999). Making music, therefore, is only possible by skillfully coupling the temporal control of movements to unfolding perceptual goals.

In addition to the effective movements required to excite, sustain, or modulate sound from an instrument, such as bowing across violin strings or striking the surface of a drum, there are also non-sounding, ancillary movements made by experts during performance that are musically relevant. Ancillary movementssuch as upper body sway, nodding, toe-tapping, head shaking, and other non-sounding gesturesare perceptually communicative to the audiences of expressive, emotional, and structural characteristics of the music, even in the absence of sound (Dahl and Friberg 2007; Davidson 1993; Vines et al. 2006, 2011). Indeed, non-musicians have been found to be more accurate at judging the intended expressive characteristics of performance from

Abstract The ancillary (non-sounding) body movements made by expert musicians during performance have been shown to indicate expressive, emotional, and structural features of the music to observers, even if the sound of the performance is absent. If such ancillary body movements are a component of skilled musical performance, then it should follow that acquiring the temporal control of such movements is a feature of musical skill acquisition. This proposition is tested using measures derived from...