music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...

, gesture is any movement, either physical (bodily) or mental (imaginary). As such "gesture" includes both categories of movements required to produce sound and categories of perceptual moves associated with those gestures. The concept of musical gestures has received much attention in various musicological disciplines (e.g. music analysis,

music therapy Music therapy, an allied health profession, "is the clinical and evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved music t ...

music psychology The psychology of music, or music psychology, is a branch of psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and/or musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behaviour and experience, including the processes through which music is pe ...

, NIME) in recent years. For example, the "musical" movement from a close-position tonic C

major chord In music theory, a major chord is a chord (music), chord that has a root (chord), root, a major third, and a perfect fifth. When a chord comprises only these three notes, it is called a major Triad (music), triad. For example, the major triad bui ...

to a close-position dominant G major chord requires on the

piano A piano is a keyboard instrument that produces sound when its keys are depressed, activating an Action (music), action mechanism where hammers strike String (music), strings. Modern pianos have a row of 88 black and white keys, tuned to a c ...

the physical movement from each white key of the first chord to the right (in space, upwards in pitch) four white keys or steps. Thus gesture includes both characteristic physical movements by performers and characteristic melodies, phrases,

chord progression In a musical composition, a chord progression or harmonic progression (informally chord changes, used as a plural, or simply changes) is a succession of chords. Chord progressions are the foundation of harmony in Western musical tradition from ...

s, and arpeggiations produced by (or producing) those movements.

Introduction

The concept of musical gestures encompasses a large territory stretching from details of sound-production to more global emotive and

aesthetic Aesthetics (also spelled esthetics) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and taste, which in a broad sense incorporates the philosophy of art.Slater, B. H.Aesthetics ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,'' , acces ...

images of music, and also include considerations of cultural-stylistic vs. more universal modes of expression. In all cases, it is believed that musical gestures manifest the primordial role of human movement in music. For this reason, scholars speak of embodied music cognition in the sense that listeners relate musical sound to mental images of gestures, i.e. that listening (or even merely imagining music) also is a process of incessant mental re-enactment of musical gestures. Acknowledging the multimodal nature of music perception, embodied music cognition could represent a change of

paradigm In science and philosophy, a paradigm ( ) is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitute legitimate contributions to a field. The word ''paradigm'' is Ancient ...

music theory Music theory is the study of theoretical frameworks for understanding the practices and possibilities of music. ''The Oxford Companion to Music'' describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory": The first is the "Elements of music, ...

and other music related research, research which has often tended to exclude considerations of bodily movement from its conceptual apparatus in favour of focus on more abstract, notation-based elements of music. Focusing on musical gestures provides a coherent and unifying perspective for a renewal of music theory and other music research.

Music-related body movement

A subset of musical gestures is what could be called music-related body movement, which can be seen from either the performer's or the perceiver's point of view: * Performer - movements that are part of a music performance or a performance with music: ** Sound-producing: musician or actor creating musical sound. ** Sound-accompanying: dance or other types of movements that are linked to music. * Perceiver - movements that are an integral part of music listening: ** Directly connected: dance, air performance ** Loosely connected: running, training. ** Grooving: tapping a foot, nodding the head, etc.

Formal definition

The first mathematical definition of gesture is given in the paper "Formulas, Diagrams, and Gestures in Music" (Journal of Mathematics and Music, Vol 1, Nr. 1 2007) by

Guerino Mazzola Guerino Bruno Mazzola (born 1947) is a Swiss mathematician, Musicology, musicologist, jazz pianist, and writer. Education and career Mazzola obtained his PhD in mathematics at University of Zürich in 1971 under the supervision of Herbert Groß a ...

(

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...

) and Moreno Andreatta (

IRCAM IRCAM (French: ''Ircam, '', English: Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music) is a French institute dedicated to the research of music and sound, especially in the fields of Avant-garde music, avant garde and Electroacoustic ...

in Paris). A gesture is a configuration of curves in space and time. More formally, a gesture is a digraph morphism from a "skeleton" of addressed points to a "body", a spatial digraph of a

topological Topology (from the Greek words , and ) is the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a geometric object that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending; that is, wit ...

category (in the musical case: time, position and pitch). Since the set of gestures of given skeleton and topological category defines a topological category, one may define gestures of gestures, so-called hypergestures.

Gesture in Indian vocal music

Indian vocalists move their hands while improvising melody. Although every vocalist has an idiosyncratic gestural style, the motion of the hand and voice are connected through various logics, and many students gesturally resemble their teachers. Nikki Moran, at the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a collegiate university, federal Public university, public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The ...

, has done research on this topic, and it is one of the subjects of Martin Clayton and Laura Leante's Musical Experience Project at the

Open University The Open University (OU) is a Public university, public research university and the largest university in the United Kingdom by List of universities in the United Kingdom by enrolment, number of students. The majority of the OU's undergraduate ...

. Clayton has published a paper on gestural interaction in Indian music performance: "Time, Gesture and Attention in a Khyal Performance." ''Asian Music'', 38 (2), 71–96. Matt Rahaim, a vocalist and ethnomusicologist, has published a book on the relationship between vocalization and gesture in Indian vocal music: '' Musicking Bodies: Gesture and Voice in Hindustani Music''. Rahaim's work approaches gesture and vocalization as parallel expressions of melody, investigates isomorphisms between gesture space and raga space, and studies the transmission and inheritance of "paramparic bodies"--vocal/postural/gestural dispositions handed down through teaching lineages.

Hatten's musical gestures

Robert Hatten (2004) has been using the concept of musical gestures to denote inner-musical qualities:

"Musical gesture is biologically and culturally grounded in communicative human movement. Gesture draws upon the close interaction (and intermodality) of a range of human perceptual and motor systems to synthesize the energetic shaping of motion through time into significant events with unique expressive force. The biological and cultural motivations of musical gesture are further negotiated within the conventions of a musical style, whose elements include both the discrete (pitch, rhythm, meter) and the analog (dynamics, articulation, temporal pacing). Musical gestures are emergent gestalts that convey affective motion, emotion, and agency by fusing otherwise separate elements into continuities of shape and force."Quoted in Bandt, Duffy, and MacKinnon (2007). ''Hearing Places'', p.355. . Citation (n.13):
Hatten, "Course Notes," Online
"

Sources

External links

Musical Gestures Group

University of Oslo The University of Oslo (; ) is a public university, public research university located in Oslo, Norway. It is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation#Europe, oldest university in Norway. Originally named the Royal Frederick Univ ...

(Norway)
Input devices and Music Interaction Laboratory

McGill University McGill University (French: Université McGill) is an English-language public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill University, Vol. I. For the Advancement of Learning, ...

The Importance of Bodily Gestures in the Music of Sofia Gubaidulina
Music Theory Online {{DEFAULTSORT:Musical Gestures Music psychology Musicology