The Co-Structuring of Gesture-Vocal Dynamics: An Exploration in Karnatak Music Performance

Venue: Virtual, please send an e-mail to zas.xtalks@leibniz-zas.de to get the Teams invitation link. To be let in, use your proper name.

Code of Conduct for ZAS events: The ZAS is committed to fair, respectful, and professional interaction at its events. Therefore, please observe the Code of Conduct for this event.

Abstract

Across a wide range of musical traditions worldwide, vocalists tend to gesture while they sing. In Indian art music contexts, connections have been noted between vocalists’ gestures and sung motifs (short musical ideas). However, systematic analyses remain scarce. In this talk, I report on my collaborations with Wim Pouw (Radboud University, Nijmegen) and Thomas Nuttall (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona) where we investigate gesture-vocal coupling and co-structuring in a corpus of Karnatak (South Indian) vocal performance recordings, which includes audio, video and motion capture data. In our co-structuring study, we ask whether there is a systematic relationship between sonic similarity of motifs and kinematic similarity of the co-occurring gestures. This research builds on work in gesture studies showing that semantically related gestures move alike (Pouw et al. 2021), which found that both silent and co-speech gestures have similar kinematic trajectories when they convey a similar concept. In the present study we go a step further by assessing this in the challenging context of continuous musical vocal performance. Through this inquiry, we provide a pipeline for characterizing the multidimensional co-structuring of body movement and vocalization in vocal performance, which could also be used in a range of other human and non-human contexts where vocalization and body movement co-occur. The study’s findings will be discussed in relation to wider theoretical work on the constraints on communicative movement.

Biography

Lara Pearson has recently joined the faculty of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Cologne, prior to which she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. Her work explores gesture, vocalization and interaction in music-related contexts, with a focus on the performance and pedagogical practices of Karnatak vocalists in South India. Her research is highly interdisciplinary, combining methods from music cognition, gesture studies, ethnomusicology and human movement science. In addition to her work on music and gesture, she has published on coarticulation in music, cross-cultural aesthetics, music notation and concepts of improvisation. She is currently Vice-Chair of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance Study Group on Sound, Movement and the Sciences (ICTMD SoMoS).