Javier Damesón

This article aims at identifying the second person attributions carried out by duets of musicians during jazz improvisation and to relate them to the sonic-kinetic features that express the musicians’ attributed intentional states. We conducted a mixed-methods study where duets produced improvisations under different visual and auditory conditions of mutual perception. Results show that (i) musicians mutually attributed musical
intentions based on their direct ‘reading’ of the partner’s sonic gestures; (ii) improvisations showed idiosyncratic features that persisted across trials; and (iii) jazz interaction bear similarities with communicative musicality in early infancy: imitation-variation emerges as an indicator of communication between musicians.

Relationships between musicians in Jazz performance can be understood as autonomous (turn-taking) versus simultaneous (playing joint), both assumed as social interactions that take place as to create meaning in a participatory way. To participate, in music performance, requires expressive alignment, in order to share the act of producing and perceiving sound and movement in an embodied-inter(en)acted phenomenological experience. In such context, interaction is assumed as an expressive exchange of meanings. In this work we study a trio jazz performance from an inter(en)acted approach, applying a methodological design that combines objective/statistical measures, and subjective/phenomenological data. An experiment that tested different conditions of turn-taking and/or joint playing of a Jazz standard was conducted in a recording studio session. All the performances were registered through audio/video media, and motion capture technology. In addition, in-depth interviews before playing/after recordings were conducted. Time series data related to sound and movement were analysed to study features of expressive alignment, accounting for descriptors of participatory sense-making. A Sense Granger measure was developed from Granger Causality measures in order to describe expressive alignment between-and-within performers. Significant differences were found in situations of turn-taking, and simultaneous playing between conditions. Results show that, beyond such differences, jazz musicians sustain interactional transactions based on their phenomenological experience of 'going together in time'. Sense Granger measures serve to account for the ways expressive alignment evolves in time, providing significant cues that help understanding participatory sense making in jazz performance.

The process of retrieving meaningful information from rhythmic responses to music imposes several methodological challenges. For one side, the indivisible connection between body actions and the musical action confines the musical phenomenon in a closed cycle of action and perception. For another side, attempts to examine internalized rhythm descriptions always require body movements, which are the natural medium for musical actions. In this study, we propose strategies that are capable of retrieving emergent rhythmic and metrical structures encoded in free movements, which are less constrained by experimental designs and less dependent on previous assumptions. The first technique processes zero-crossing events across velocity patterns in order to estimate the changes of directions across metric levels. The second technique uses local accumulation of instantaneous velocity in order to describe the profiles of metric engagement abstracted from the morphology of the movement trajectories. The techniques help to trace comparisons and build representations of metrical structures. The paper discusses the possibilities and new perspectives of the methods by looking at two case studies with different analyses of movement responses to Argentinian chacarera and Afro-Brazilian samba music.

From all hidden assumptions behind the models of musical meter and rhythm, the notion that all individuals understand the periodic structure of music in the same way might be the most intractable and risky one. A number of evidences show that musical cultures differ in a number of aspects including cognitive priorities, musical function and relationships between music, movement and dance. From the methodological point of view, it is very difficult to describe the understanding of rhythm structures: tapping methods are limiting and biased, surveys can be too subjective and analyses of performances are ambiguous and multivariate. From the point of view of culture, cultural preferences may be subtle and comparisons between contrasting cultures might be unreliable. In this study we realize cross-cultural comparisons between free movement responses to musical cultures of samba and chacarera music, executed by Brazilian and Argentinian acculturated subjects. We use methods that track the density of kinematic events in the metrical grid at each level of the metrical structure. The results contrast to traditional models of metric structure by exposing an intrinsic diversity, variability and asymmetry of movement responses. The results also show morphological characteristics connected to cultural differences.