The influence of cellist's postural movements on their musical expressivity
Jocelyn Rozé, Mitsuko Aramaki, Richard Kronland-Martinet, Sølvi Ystad · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2017
A particularly fascinating aspect of musical expressivity concerns the relationships between the musician’s body and acoustical signal features of the sounds produced by the instrument. Numerous studies have demonstrated this connection, referring to embodied musical cognition, not only through well-studied instrumental gestures directly responsible for the sound production, but also through the use of more indirect and ingrained ancillary movements. Our actual project aims to better understand the influence of these postural adjustments on the expressive musical interpretation for the cello instrument. To this aim, we conducted an experiment involving several professional cellists subjected to various kinds of postural constraints, and analysed the influence of these constraints on sound signal features by comparing constrained and natural playing situations. The results reveal that the cellists’ body movements play an important role during performance. In fact, the torso and especially the head movements appear to insure the metric coherence with the bowing gesture as well as an expressive musical phrasing and rich timbre variations. Finally, we explored more in depth the harsh notes frequently occurring in the most constrained condition, and drew correlations between this timbral degradation and bowing and postural features, with the aim of proposing new pedagogical tools for beginners.