There is a growing body of research delving into the physical and emotional processes that take place between musicians as they play, and audiences as they experience, music. More and more, though, new technology is bringing artists together in mixed reality experiences that don’t have a precedence.
How do those conditions affect performance, and issues like coordination between musicians in an ensemble?
Answering that question was the goal of a newly published study by researchers at the Department of Art, Music, and Theatre Science at Ghent University in Belgium.
It’s one of the first studies to look at how using real-time, low-latency networking to facilitate collaboration between musicians affects the result.
The Experiment
They began by creating a mixed reality platform where musicians could play together remotely in real time, using three-dimensional avatars in what amounts to a virtual drum circle. The participants had to perform polyrhythmic patterns together.
They evaluated their performance using statistical and regression analyses, among others. The researchers used two different dimensions to measure the effects:
- The contrast between visual connections, i.e. not seeing each other, seeing each other as avatars, and seeing each other in real conditions;
- What happens when an auditory context is introduced, including both a metronome and music that participants heard as they played?
The Results
As the researchers note, music research opens the door to many other issues, including human behaviour, perception, cognition studies, and things like computer science and even engineering. Composing, performing, improvising — these all use different skills.
The study, in a larger sense, reveals some of the dynamics of coordinated group activities, which are an essential element of human society.
- When it came to strictly performance, the best cue was the polyrhythmic auditory context provided in the experiment — but, it resulted in improved individual rather than joint performance. It also improved the participants’ sense of agency or control over the music.
- Visual context — both using the avatar and in real life — had a positive impact on the experience reported by the participants, and increased prosocial effects. Among what the researchers dubbed “prosocial” effects were things like joint decision making, and feelings of shared control or agency.
- Adding a visual connection also led to the participants having a sense of merging into a unit as they played.
- Bodily coordination was related to visual context; the amount of energy used in movements was related to the auditory context.
- Coregulation, meaning the way the musicians would react and adjust to each other’s playing, improved with visual connections. The researchers postulated that visual cues allowed the musicians to predict their partner’s actions, and therefore adjust to changes, and varying levels of difficulty in the music.
While the researchers acknowledged issues such as the small sample size, they pointed to the necessity for further research into the field of sensorimotor synchronization and coordination.
Coordinated actions involve several things, including the sensorimotor, affective, and cognitive processes facilitating coordination. It points to the idea that cognition itself finds its root in sensory/motor skills. They’re not separate, in other words, but work together.
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