Multiple perspectives on musical gesture
Musical gesture is complex matter and the question of methodology and terminology for gesture studies in music is a challenge. What are the layers of meaning formation in musical performance? How can I approach the cultural and subjective layers of a musician's actions in performance? In the initial stage we made analysis of traditional music performances in TV-shows. After the premiere I also approached the data generated within my project to create a further understanding of the working process. The material we generated has been video documentation of workshops, rehearsals and performances. The analysis of the data has involved the three performers in The Six Tones and the choreographer Marie Fahlin. We have been making qualitative analysis using the software Hyper Research for the coding and analysis. Just as important as the coding itself is, I believe, the making of annotations to the clips. I find these annotations to often provide the beginning of the further analysis of the material. Observational analysis of video material is a method which has its limitations but it can be shaped both for generating qualitative and quantitative analysis. Much analysis of movement and gesture draws on material collected under more laboratory like circumstances using motion capture or video recordings in settings that facilitate quantitative analysis. The ethnomusicologist Martin Clayton (2007) [4] discusses methods for quantitative analysis of video data collected in natural settings based on multiple coding in a software similar to Hyper Research with the ambition to concentrate ‘on the precise coding of clearly-defined events rather than on the partially subjective interpretation of gesture phrases’ (ibid p.29). It has been our intention with the coding of the video material to attempt at gesture analysis with similar precision.
But how can I create an understanding that captures the multiple layers of meaning in musical performance? Marc Leman (2010) [5] suggests a three-layered analytical perspective on musical gesture, starting with the 3rd person perspective in which measurements are made to try to establish repeatable data about a certain gesture type. He further discusses the social interactions typical of a 2nd person perspective and ways of approaching different layers of subjective understandings in a 1st person perspective. In our analysis in the work on Inside Outside we have attempted to embrace these multiple perspectives in order to capture some of the complexity of gesture and its cultural meanings. More specifically we have been looking at 1st and 3d person perspectives in analyzing both the choreography of gender in traditional music performance and when looking at the choreography in Inside Outside. The second person perspective seems interesting and relevant but has not been as obviously needed to approach the current materials.
A typology of musical gesture
The research on musical gesture of Rolf-Inge Godøy and Alexander Refsum Jensenius has been a theoretical basis for the analysis we have made of gendered gesture in TV-shows as well as of the performance work itself. Even if I will later produce examples of how the real world objects of enquiry are more complex, we find useful the classification they suggest of musical gesture into four analytical categories:
- Sound-producing gesture, actions that are responsible for the sounding result
- Communicative gesture, is movement intended for communication with others: audience, other players and so on.
- Sound-facilitating gesture is a category of actions that are linked to both sound-producing and communicative gesture. Although they do not produce sound, they aid the action in various ways, for instance in the way musicians keep common time through rocking movements
- Sound-accompanying gesture is movement that is made in response to the sound, like dancing and marching (Jensenius 2010, pp 23-24) [1]
In musical performance, these visual gesture-types and the sounding result of the actions create compound units, from an ecological understanding of human perception, Godøy calls them gestural-sonorous objects (Godøy, 2006). With reference to the typology and morphology of sound-objects by Pierre Schaeffer (Schaeffer, 1966) Godøy suggests a paradoxical parallel between this seminal work of the analysis of sound objects and the nature of these multi-dimensional perceptual entities. [2]
We have taken the concept of the gestural-sonorous object as an artistic quest that demands further artistic exploration. [3] However, as will be seen also in the examples of practice in this presentation, we also find relevant the Schaefferian division of sound and source and develop an approach to the gestural-sonorous object that also involves experimenting with a decoupling of visual and sonic gesture. The choreography draws on gesture material from TV-shows but in general, the visual gesture is coupled with different sounding results. There are also moments when the gestural-sonorous objects in Inside/Outside are similar to the sources, especially in the section built on rocking movements. But much of the identity of the piece is built from this de-coupling of gesture and sound.
Immediately after the performances, we set up a conversation between The Six Tones and Marie Fahlin that was a first attempt to approach the making of the piece from a first person perspective. After these conversations, several interview sessions and individual coding of video documentation from the performances were carried out to continue adding to an analytical understanding of the process of making the piece and its significance for the performers who took part.
In May 2012 we started coding video of traditional music performance in TV-shows. The material was collected by Ngô Trà My and was kindly submitted by producers from several TV-stations. Our working sessions took place at the Electronic Music Studios (EMS) in Stockholm. The analysis was made in joint coding sessions with Marie Fahlin, Stefan Östersjö and myself. Obviously, our pre-understanding of the material was very different, while the two Westerners had little or no previous knowledge of this phenomenon, I had been a performer in such TV-shows for many years. Our analysis resulted in a little catalogue of gesture types that in turn became the material for the choreography which was developed in workshops in August.
The analysis in the first stage was carried out from a 3rd person perspective. Our initial focus was towards playing related actions. It was striking for all of us how strongly gendered the gesture was in the performances and how these movement types would extend the playing related actions in ways that had no relation to sound production, or would even be counter to the intended sound. Our observations were enhanced by the difference we found in the movement of the few male performers in the TV-shows. [6]
The different gestures that caught our interest we analysed as communicative gesture that emerged from extended and modified sound-producing gesture. The gendered aspects of these modifications are related to the decorative function of these extended movements. It was anything but obvious how to analyse the action in the videos and the coding sessions took shape as an extensive discussion between the three of us. We eventually arrived at the following master code list:
- extended soundproducing gesture
- de-coupled extended soundproducing gesture (the soundproducing movement is both extended and also repeated without relation for instance to actual plucking of a string etc)
- extended preparation
- rocking
- smile to the camera (communicative gesture)
- conducting
At a later stage this analysis was also enhanced by a 1st person perspective through conversations between myself and Trà My about the performance of traditional Vietnamese music. This was carried out in interview sessions with the three performers (and also involving the choreographer Marie Fahlin) and in coding sessions where the coding and the annotations all referred to the subjective meaning of the gesture.
The above image presents the codes from the analysis of TV-shows to the left. In the right end are the codes from the 3rd person perspective analysis of Inside/Outside that corresponded with the codes used in the analysis of TV-shows. However, the codes refer to the visual gesture and not to all properties of the gestural-sonorous objects. Again, this become a fundamental modus operandi in the making of Inside/Outside. Most of these instances that have shared gestural content do at the same time have radically different sounding outcome. The middle field represents the various 1st person perspectives that inform the understanding of the subjective perception of the materials. For instance, in the top left corner we find the rocking code, a gesture type that is also found in several shapes in Inside/Outside. The annotation that I made, referred to by the code ”exposing my body” and provides the perspective of my subjective understanding of these gestural materials.
In the next section (Inside the Choreography of Gender) I present some of the video material on which we built the analysis and discuss the first and third person understandings that we developed in the analysis and through the artistic work. In the discussion we will return to the above image and attempt to draw some connections between the analytical levels.
[6] Men do indeed also bring stereotyped choreographies to performances in TV-shows. We never coded these actions types properly in the analysis but one may say that the choreography of male performance is based on the authoritative simplicity in the behaviour of western men in popular media. So, male performance is presented as naturally authoritative and men avoid any decorative movements apart from mere expressions of strength and self confidence.
[5] Leman, M: (2010) Music, Gesture and the Formation of Embodied Meaning. In Godøy and Leman (Eds) Musical Gestures. Sound Movement and Meaning (2010), Routledge, New York
[4] Clayton, M: (2007) Observing entrainment in music performance: Video-based observational analysis of Indian musicians' tanpura playing and beat marking, Musicae Scientiae 2007 11: 27
[1] Jensenius, A. F., 2007: Action - Sound: Developing Methods and Tools to Study Music-related Body Movement. (Oslo: University of Oslo).
[3] More recent research into the function of gesture in musical performance has confirmed the development of our general understanding of human perception - for instance with the discovery of the mirror neurons - as fundamentally multi modal (Gallese & Goldman 1998). Hence, human perception of music is not acousmatic but is stored as motor-mimetic images of movement, action and sound (Godøy 1993, 2006). This conception of our perception of music may be seen as the foundation for the artistic research project Music in Movement which forms an attempt to merge the practices of choreography and musical composition. Music in Movement is an artistic research project headed by the Malmö Academy of Music in collaboration with composers and researchers in Sweden, Norway, France, Austria, U.S.A. and Vietnam. Inside/Outside was the first main artistic output of this research.
[2] For instance, if we consider three of Schaeffer’s basic envelope categories (the dynamic shape) of sound objects - Impulsive, Sustained and Iterative - Godøy makes the observation that these sound objects also have corresponding gesture types in the action of the performer. Understood as compound units of gesture and sound he identifies the corresponding gestural-sonorous objects: discontinuous gesture, continuous gesture and iterative gesture. Godøy, R., 2006: Gestural-Sonorous Objects: embodied extensions of Schaeffer's conceptual apparatus. Organised sound, 11 (2), 149-157.