Methods for the analysis of rhythmic and metrical responses to music in free movement trajectories
Luiz Naveda, Isabel Cecilia Martínez, Javier Damesón, Alejandro Pereira Ghiena, Romina Herrera, Manuel Alejandro Ordás · El Servicio de Difusión de la Creación Intelectual (National University of La Plata) · 2015
The process of retrieving meaningful information from rhythmicresponses to music imposes several methodological challenges. For one side,the indivisible connection between body actions and the musical action confinesthe musical phenomenon in a closed cycle of action and perception. For anotherside, attempts to examine internalized rhythm descriptions always require bodymovements, which are the natural medium for musical actions. In this study, wepropose strategies that are capable of retrieving emergent rhythmic and metricalstructures encoded in free movements, which are less constrained byexperimental designs and less dependent on previous assumptions. The firsttechnique processes zero-crossing events across velocity patterns in order toestimate the changes of directions across metric levels. The second techniqueuses local accumulation of instantaneous velocity in order to describe theprofiles of metric engagement abstracted from the morphology of themovement trajectories. The techniques help to trace comparisons and buildrepresentations of metrical structures. The paper discusses the possibilities andnew perspectives of the methods by looking at two case studies with differentanalyses of movement responses to Argentinian chacarera and Afro-Braziliansamba music.