In this video, we will look at some
of the methods we use to study music-related body motion.
Let us first briefly recall that when we say music-related body
motion, we mean all types of motion
carried out by performers and by perceivers.
Performers are different types of musicians and dancers,
while perceivers are audience members during concerts, people
dancing at clubs, or people's spontaneous motion
to music in everyday life.
As such, music-related body motion
is a diverse category, ranging from being purely instrumental,
such as hitting a piano key, to be purely communicative,
such as gesticulating in the air.
To add to the complexity, music-related motion
may occur in any type of location,
for example a concept hall, at home, in the street,
or in the club setting.
So the challenge for music researchers
interested in studying motion is to choose
methods that allow for studying such motion
in a systematic manner.
It is also necessary to study the motion in relation
to, for example, a musical score, sound recordings,
and different types of contextual data.
In this and future videos, we will look more
into how we do this.
But let me first start by introducing some more
challenges we need to think of when studying
music-related movement.
First of all, the aim.
Why is music-related motion interesting
in this particular study?
What kind of study will this be part of?
What kind of interaction is planned, such as, for example,
looking at relationships between sounds and humans,
or human sound, or even relationships
between humans and humans in the musical context.
Second, the subjects.
How many subjects will be studied?
What is the demography, the gender, age, their music motor
abilities, personal context, for example
are they familiar or unfamiliar with the task?
Will they be alone?
Will they be a group?
Will they move together in a group?
And what is the social context of the study?
The third thing to think about is what type of motion
is to be expected, and in which parts of the body the motion
will be carried out.
Are they large or small?
Are they slow or fast?
Will the subjects be stationary, or will they move about?
Is it necessary to find the absolute position in space,
or is relative motion information sufficient?
We also need to think about the environment.
Will the study be carried out in a controlled environment,
such as in a lab setting.
Or in what we call an ecological setting, such as a concert
hall.
Is there electrical power available?
How much time is there to set up equipment?
What are the lighting conditions?
Et cetera.
Also, if you start to think about the musicians themselves,
are they going to use any artefacts or instruments?
Or will there be other types of tools or technologies
that need to be recorded in the set up.
And how will they be captured and synchronised together
with the other types of video, audio, and data recorded?
When it comes to the audio, what type of sound recording
is needed?
How many channels?
What type of sampling frequencies
bit rates are to be used?
And what is the necessary level of synchronisation
between motion and sound data?
When it comes to recording video,
what type of video recording is needed?
How many cameras, what resolutions and frame rates
are to be used?
And finally, a tricky one.
The data handling.
How will all these different types of data be synchronised?
What software are you going to use to analyse this?
What data formats will you use?
What type of storage, backup, and sharing solutions
are planned?
So these are a number of the challenges
that we need to look at.
Finally, before starting to look at music-related movement
recordings, it's also useful to think of the type of analysis
being planned.
There are numerous analytical approaches to choose from,
and we're going to present some of this in this course.
Generally, though, we can talk about two main categories,
descriptive analysis on one hand, and functional analysis.
Through the descriptive analysis,
we talk about the kinematics, for example the velocity
or acceleration of body parts, some spatial features,
such as the size and position in the room.
Or temporal features, such as the frequency,
how fast are things and movements happening.
When it comes to the functional analysis,
we talk about how the motion has functional properties.
For example, are we talking about sound producing
or sound accompanying actions?
And/or other types of communicative types
of movements.
The descriptive analysis methods may often
be associated with quantitative analysis approaches.
That is, working with numbers in different ways
and using statistical methods to extract meaningful information
from these numbers.
Functional analysis, on the other hand,
may be based on qualitative analysis approaches.
For example, using text-based reasoning and interpretation.
In most real life cases, however, often we
are talking about combination of both descriptive and functional
analysis.
And using, also, both qualitative and quantitative
methods.
As such, these methods should be seen as complimentary
rather than competing with each other.