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The paper presents a study of the noise level of accelerometer data from a mobile phone compared to three commercially available IMU-based devices (AX3, Equivital, and Movesense) and a marker-based infrared motion capture system (Qualisys). The sensors are compared in static positions and for measuring human micromotion, with larger motion sequences as reference. The measurements show that all but one of the IMU-based devices capture motion with an accuracy and precision that is far below human micromotion. However, their data and representations differ, so care should be taken when comparing data between devices.

Attentional selection of a second target in a rapid stream of stimuli embedding two targets tends to be briefly impaired when two targets are presented in close temporal proximity, an effect known as an attentional blink (AB). Two target sounds (T1 and T2) were embedded in a rapid serial auditory presentation of environmental sounds with a short (Lag 3) or long lag (Lag 9). Participants were to first identify T1 (bell or sine tone) and then to detect T2 (present or absent). Individual stimuli had durations of either 30 or 90 ms, and were presented in streams of 20 sounds. The T2 varied in category: human voice, cello, or dog sound. Previous research has introduced pupillometry as a useful marker of the intensity of cognitive processing and attentional allocation in the visual AB paradigm. Results suggest that the interplay of stimulus factors is critical for target detection accuracy and provides support for the hypothesis that the human voice is the least likely to show an auditory AB (in the 90 ms condition). For the other stimuli, accuracy for T2 was significantly worse at Lag 3 than at Lag 9 in the 90 ms condition, suggesting the presence of an auditory AB. When AB occurred (at Lag 3), we observed smaller pupil dilations, time-locked to the onset of T2, compared to Lag 9, reflecting lower attentional processing when ’blinking’ during target detection. Taken together, these findings support the conclusion that human voices escape the AB and that the pupillary changes are consistent with the so-called T2 attentional deficit. In addition, we found some indication that salient stimuli like human voices could require a less intense allocation of attention, or noradrenergic potentiation, compared to other auditory stimuli.

Musicians experience varying degrees of togetherness with their co-performers when playing in ensembles. However, little is known about how togetherness is experienced by audiences and how interpersonal dynamics in body motion and sound support the judgment of togetherness. This research investigates audience sensitivity to audio and visual markers of interperformer coordination and expressivity in ensembles, in relation to modality of stimulus presentation and audience music background. A set of duo ensemble performances, comprising motion capture recordings of the musicians' upper bodies and instruments, were presented to participants with varying music background, including novices and semi-professional musicians. Participants were required to: (i) watch and listen, (ii) only watch, and (iii) only listen to the selected recordings, whilst providing dynamic ratings of how much togetherness between musicians they perceived. Results demonstrate that sound intensity and similarity in right arm motion (quantified using cross-wavelet transform analysis) were significant predictors of rated togetherness in novices, whilst sound synchronization and chest motion coordination predicted togetherness responses in semi-professional musicians. These results suggest the relevance of the quality of body motion coordination and of certain features of the audio outputs in the audience perception of togetherness. This research contributes to a better understanding of the perceptual mechanisms supporting socio-cognitive judgments of joint action activities.

The two-volume Oxford Handbook of Music Performance provides a resource that musicians, scholars and educators will use as the most important and authoritative overview of work within the areas of music psychology and performance science. The 80 experts from 13 countries who prepared the 53 chapters in this handbook are leaders in the fields of music psychology, performance science, musicology, psychology, education and music education. Chapters in the Handbook provide a broad coverage of the area with considerable expansion of the topics that are normally covered in a resource of this type. Designed around eight distinct sections - Development and Learning, Proficiencies, Performance Practices, Psychology, Enhancements, Health & Wellbeing, Science, and Innovations - the range and scope of The Oxford Handbook of Music Performance is much wider than other publications through the inclusion of chapters from related disciplines such as performance science (e.g., optimizing performance, mental techniques, talent development in non-music areas), and education (e.g., human development, motivation, learning and teaching styles) as well as the attention given to emerging critical issues in the field (e.g., wellbeing, technology, gender, diversity, inclusion, identity, resilience and buoyancy, diseases, and physical and mental disabilities). Within each chapter, authors have selected what they consider to be the most important scientific and artistic material relevant to their topic. They begin their chapters by surveying theoretical views on each topic and then, in the final part of the chapter, highlight practical implications of the literature that performers will be able to apply within their daily musical lives.

Recent years have seen a rise in interest, from a diversity of fields, in the musical ensemble as an exemplary form of creative group behavior. Musical ensembles can be understood and investigated as high functioning small group organizations that have coordinative structures in place to perform under pressure within strict temporal boundaries. Rehearsals and performances exemplify fruitful contexts for emergent creative behaviour, where novel musical interpretations are negotiated and discovered through improvisatory interaction. Furthermore, group music-making can be an emotionally and socially rewarding experience that enables positive outcomes for wellbeing and development. This book brings together these different perspectives into one coherent volume, offering insight into the musical ensemble from different analytical levels. Part 1 starts from the meso-level, considering ensembles as creative teams and investigating how musical groups interact at a social and organizational level. Part 2 then zooms in to consider musical coordination and interaction at a micro-level, when considering group music-making as forms of joint action. Finally, a macro-level perspective is taken in Part 3, examining the health and wellbeing affordances associated with acoustical, expressive, and emotional joint behavior. Each part contains a balance of review chapters showcasing the most recent developments in each area of research, followed by demonstrative case studies featuring various ensemble practices and processes. A rich and multidisciplinary reflection on ensemble music practice, this volume will be an insightful read for music students, teachers, academics, and professionals with an interest in the dynamics of group behavior within a musical context.

Ensemble musicians engage with each other visually through glances and body motion. We conducted a case study to test how string quartet musicians would respond to playing conditions that were meant to discourage or promote visually communicative behaviour. A quartet performed in different seating configurations under rehearsal and concert conditions. Quantity of head motion was reduced when musicians’ gaze was constrained. Differences in gaze and body motion between musicians reflected their musical roles in the ensemble. Overall, our findings suggest that gaze and motion dynamics vary within and between performances in response to changing musical, situational and social factors.

Music performance can be cognitively and physically demanding. These demands vary across the course of a performance as the content of the music changes. More demanding passages require performers to focus their attention more intensity, or expend greater “mental effort.” To date, it remains unclear what effect different cognitive-motor demands have on performers' mental effort. It is likewise unclear how fluctuations in mental effort compare between performers and perceivers of the same music. We used pupillometry to examine the effects of different cognitive-motor demands on the mental effort used by performers and perceivers of classical string quartet music. We collected pupillometry, motion capture, and audio-video recordings of a string quartet as they performed a rehearsal and concert (for live audience) in our lab. We then collected pupillometry data from a remote sample of musically-trained listeners, who heard the audio recordings (without video) that we captured during the concert. We used a modelling approach to assess the effects of performers' bodily effort (head and arm motion; sound level; performers' ratings of technical difficulty), musical complexity (performers' ratings of harmonic complexity; a score-based measure of harmonic tension), and expressive difficulty (performers' ratings of expressive difficulty) on performers' and listeners' pupil diameters. Our results show stimulating effects of bodily effort and expressive difficulty on performers' pupil diameters, and stimulating effects of expressive difficulty on listeners' pupil diameters. We also observed negative effects of musical complexity on both performers and listeners, and negative effects of performers' bodily effort on listeners, which we suggest may reflect the complex relationships that these features share with other aspects of musical structure. Looking across the concert, we found that both of the quartet violinists (who exchanged places halfway through the concert) showed more dilated pupils during their turns as 1st violinist than when playing as 2nd violinist, suggesting that they experienced greater arousal when “leading” the quartet in the 1st violin role. This study shows how eye tracking and motion capture technologies can be used in combination in an ecological setting to investigate cognitive processing in music performance.

This paper describes a comparative analysis of tracking quality in two infrared marker-based motion capture systems: one older but high-end (Qualisys, purchased in 2009) and the other newer and mid-range (OptiTrack, purchased in 2019). We recorded performances by a string quartet with both systems simultaneously, using the same frame rate. Our recording set-up included a combination of moving markers (affixed to musicians’ bodies) and stationary markers (affixed to music stands). Higher noise levels were observed in Qualisys recordings of stationary markers than in OptiTrack recordings, as well as a greater spatial range, though OptiTrack recordings had a higher rate of outliers (“spikes” in the signal). In moving markers, increased quantity of motion was associated with increased betweensystem error rates. Both systems showed minimal withintrial drift but a reduction in recording accuracy and precision over the duration of the experiment. Overall, our results show that the older/high-end system (Qualisys) produced slightly lower-quality recordings than the newer/midrange system (OptiTrack). We discuss how our findings may inform researchers’ interpretations of motion capture data, particularly when capturing the types of motion that are important for performing music.

Increasingly, research on music performance is moving out of controlled laboratory settings and into concert halls, where there are opportunities to explore how performance unfolds in high-arousal conditions and how performers and audiences interact. In this session, we will present findings from a series of live research concerts that we carried out with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra performed the same program of classical repertoire for four audiences of schoolchildren and an audience of families. Orchestra members wore sensors that collected cardiac activity, respiration, and body motion data, and the conductor additionally wore a full-body motion capture suit and eye-tracking glasses. Audience members in some of the concerts were invited to wear reflective wristbands, and wristband motion was captured using infrared video recording. We will begin the session with a discussion of the scientific and methodological challenges that arose during the project, in particular relating to the large scale of data capture (>50 musicians and hundreds of audience members), the visible nature of research that is carried out on a concert stage, and the development of procedures for aligning data from different recording modalities. Next, we will present findings from two lines of analysis that investigate different aspects of behavioural and physiological coordination within the orchestra. One analysis investigates the effects of audience noise and musical roles on coherence in (i) cardiac rate and variability and (ii) respiratory phase and rate. The second analysis investigates the effects of musical demands on synchronization of body sway, bowing, and respiration in string sections. We will conclude the session with an open discussion of how live concert research might be optimized.

The paper presents a study of the noise level of accelerometer data from a mobile phone compared to three commercially available IMU-based devices (AX3, Equivital, and Movesense) and a marker-based infrared motion capture system (Qualisys). The sensors are compared in static positions and for measuring human micromotion, with larger motion sequences as reference. The measurements show that all but one of the IMU-based devices capture motion with an accuracy and precision that is far below human micromotion. However, their data and representations differ, so care should be taken when comparing data between devices.

The extent to which elite athletes depend on mental effort and attention to task execution has been a debated topic. Some studies have suggested that motor experts might be relatively unaffected in the face of distraction and that they might even perform better when they attend to extraneous cognitive stimuli (for example in a dual-task paradigm), as compared to single-task conditions where they concentrate fully on a sports task. However, task complexity and participants’ skill levels have so far been relatively modest in most dual-task studies. To address gaps in past research, a multi-method study was conducted using a rowing ergometer task. Participants were nine male elite rowers from the Norwegian national rowing team, preparing for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, as well as nine male recreational rowers. Participants engaged in three-minute rowing trials of varying task demands, including single-task conditions (focusing on rowing only) and dual-task conditions (focusing on rowing and solving arithmetic problems). Performance and mental effort were measured via ergometer data (i.e., rowing speed values) and eye-tracking measures (i.e., blink rates and pupil size measurements), respectively. Movement kinematics was measured by motion capture technology. The results suggested that adding extraneous cognitive load led to performance decline and increased mental effort across all participants. Both elites and non-elites demonstrated kinematic changes when going from single-task to dual-task performance. That is, kinematic events in participants’ lower-body and upper-body segments became more temporally coupled, and more in line with movement patterns associated with novice athletes when the extraneous cognitive load was added. This study contradicts several past findings and suggests that elite athletes rely on attentional resources to execute fundamental aspects of their performance. Funding source: Research Council of Norway.

This paper describes a comparative analysis of tracking quality in two infrared marker-based motion capture systems: one older but high-end (Qualisys, purchased in 2009) and the other newer and mid-range (OptiTrack, purchased in 2019). We recorded performances by a string quartet with both systems simultaneously, using the same frame rate. Our recording set-up included a combination of moving markers (affixed to musicians’ bodies) and stationary markers (affixed to music stands). Higher noise levels were observed in Qualisys recordings of stationary markers than in OptiTrack recordings, as well as a greater spatial range, though OptiTrack recordings had a higher rate of outliers (“spikes” in the signal). In moving markers, increased quantity of motion was associated with increased between-system error rates. Both systems showed minimal within-trial drift but a reduction in recording accuracy and precision over the duration of the experiment. Overall, our results show that the older/high-end system (Qualisys) produced slightly lower-quality recordings than the newer/mid-range system (OptiTrack). We discuss how our findings may inform researchers’ interpretations of motion capture data, particularly when capturing the types of motion that are important for performing music.