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On the effect of synchronized and non-synchronized music on runners’ foot strike impact
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The effect of (a)synchronous music on runners‘ lower leg impact loading
Full text linkRunning with musical accompaniment is becoming increasingly popular and several pieces of software have been developed that match the music tempo to the exerciser’s running cadence, that is, foot strikes per minute. Synchronizing music with running cadence has been shown to affect several aspects of performance output and perception. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of synchronous music on runners’ foot impact loading. This represents the ground reaction force on the runner’s lower leg when the foot impacts the ground and is an important parameter for the prevention of tibial fracture injuries. Twenty-eight participants ran five times for three minutes and 30 seconds with a short break between each run. During the first 30 seconds of each running sequence, participants ran at a self-paced tempo without musical accompaniment, and running speed and cadence were measured. Subsequently, they were requested to keep their reference speed constant for the following three minutes, with the help of three monitoring screens placed along the track. During this part of the experiment, the music was either absent (No Music), matched to the runner’s cadence (Tempo-entrained Sync), phase-locked with foot strikes (Phase-locked Sync), or played at a tempo 30% slower (Minus 30%) or faster (Plus 30%) than the initially measured running cadence. No significant differences between synchronous and asynchronous music were retrieved for impact loading. However, a non-negligible average increase of impact level could be observed for running sessions with music compared to running in silence. These findings might be especially relevant for treatment purposes, such as exercise prescription and gait retraining, and should be taken into account when designing musical (re-)training programmes
A multimodal interactive installation for collaborative music making : from preservation to enhanced user design
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Multimodal analysis of synchronization data from patients with dementia
Full text linkLittle is known about the abilities of people with dementia to synchronize bodily movements to music. The lack of non-intrusive tools that do not hinder patients, and the absence of appropriate analysis methods may explain why such investigations remain challenging. This paper discusses the development of an analysis framework for processing sensorimotor synchronization data obtained from multiple measuring devices. The data was collected during an explorative study, carried out at the University Hospital of Reims (F), involving 16 individuals with dementia. The study aimed at testing new methods and measurement tools developed to investigate sensorimotor synchronization capacities in people with dementia. An analysis framework was established for the extraction of quantity of motion and synchronization parameters from the multimodal dataset composed of sensor, audio, and video data. A user-friendly monitoring tool and analysis framework has been established and tested that holds potential to respond to the needs of complex movement data handling. The study enabled improving of the hardware and software robustness. It provides a strong framework for future experiments involving people with dementia interacting with music
Shifting the musical beat to influence running cadence
Full text linkThe use of music in the fields of sport and rehabilitation has been explored in several ways. Mostly, these studies have dealt with the effect of different types or genres of music and the difference between using synchronous or asynchronous music. Within the studies on synchronous music there is some discrepancy as to what is considered to be synchronous. This varies from music with a tempo in the range of the tempo belonging to a certain task, to music that is exactly matched in tempo to the task's tempo. The use of tempo- matching music allows us to even do more fine-grained music alterations: shifting the beat to try to spontaneously manipulate a runner's cadence. Musical tempo has been shown to have an effect on running. Instead of changing running cadence by manipulating the musical tempo, we explored the possibility of manipulating cadence by changing the relative phase angle of the musical beat. Twenty-six recreational runners ran four minutes, nine times. The first minute of each 4-min sequence consisted of running without musical accompaniment. Running cadence was measured and the average cadence of the final 15 sec was used to select a musical track with matching tempo. In the following three minutes we tried to increase or decrease the runner's tempo up to 5%. Three different coupling strengths, meaning a small, medium or big timing difference between the beat and the footfall, were tested. The study revealed a significant main effect of the phase angle adjustment strategies on runners' cadence and velocity. Furthermore, a significant gender interaction effect was found for runners’ cadence adaptation. Women spontaneously increased or decreased their running tempo with the +5% and -5% target tempo conditions respectively. Men, however, could be sped-up, but not slowed-down more than the decrease in cadence that was already observed when the musical beats were perfectly synchronized with the footfalls. In addition to effects on kinematics, the results showed higher enjoyment levels with music than with metronome, and a decrease in enjoyment with the -5% tempo conditions. Being able to influence runners' cadence, velocity, and enjoyment through phase-shifted music is an interesting finding in the light of preventing and treating common running-related injuries
Gestures as an interface of performers’ intentionality : a case study of Western Embodiment of Karnatic Music in piano performance
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Music performance has a strong corporeal dimension, involving different types of gestures (technical gestures, expressive gestures, etc.) that performers employ to transform a written score into live music (Leman 2007). This transformation is based on the musical intentions that arise from the performers’ personal interpretation of the composition as an outcome of their artistic praxis, which leads to decisions on how to play the music in terms of its structure, articulation of the phrases, dynamics, timber and the necessary motor strategies to realize these decisions in the sounding music.
Aims This research wants to investigate musical gestures as an interface of performers’ intentionality, i.e. an outcome of the artistic praxis and the process of embodiment, in the light of the recent theories on enactment and embodied music cognition (Leman 2016). For this reason, we considered a case study based on the interpretation of a piece that includes the acquisition and embodiment of musical knowledge quite knew to the performer in order to map the modifications in the corporeal engagement from an intuitive approach to a conscious approach. The composition chosen was a contemporary piano piece based on a non-western music tradition: the Karnatic modes from South India.
Method To assist the performer in (re)framing the phases of her artistic process, a methodology, called performer based analysis method (Caruso et al 2016), was developed to establish also the procedures of a performative experiment where the performance of the 8th cycle from the 72 Etudes Karnatiques pour piano by Jacques Charpentier (b.1933) was taken as a case study. The performative experiment required a period of preparation, which concerns the performer/researcher’s artistic praxis (to embody the piece) and the self-observation of a video recording archive of her performances in order to map and describe the artistic praxis. The pianist conducted a musicological research on the influence of Indian music in the French contemporary piano repertoire to enrich specifically her current competences in Karnatic Music and had a collaborative three years practice with the composer and with two experts in Karnatic music, a singer and a dancer (see the Re-Orient project: http://re-orient.wixsite.com/indiandream). A retrospective thinking-aloud procedure (Van den Haak & De Jong, 2003) was used during the experiment to allow the performer in rendering explicit and systematic the artistic reflections. The experiment was recorded by a video camera, a microphone and the Motion Capture System.
Results To catch the development between the initial intuitive performance and the final embodied performance, two recordings of one fragment from the piece played with these two different approaches (intuitive and conscious) were compared. The analysis of these fragments was based on an alignment between qualitative data acquired through subjective descriptions - based on a performance model and a score annotation - and quantitative data (objective measurements) produced by the audio-video and motion capture recordings. The qualitative and quantitative data (audio and video) were processed through the ELAN software. Gestural similarities and differences between the intuitive and conscious versions were detected by comparing the kinematic and audio measurements (quantitative data) with the performer’s subjective annotations (qualitative data) concerning the motor strategies and the interpretative cues. The results show a different corporeal engagement of the pianist related to the different intentions through a parallel configuration of these two different subjective and objective layers.
Conclusions The actual investigation wants to present musical gestures as vehicles of idiosyncratic intentions and expressions by linking performers’ corporeal engagement to the embodiment of their interpretation in order to better understand the connection between musical intentions, goal actions and sound. The role of the technology-mediated approach (thirdperson’s perspective) gives the opportunity to study, as in a mirror-like tool, some aspects, which imply the performer’s subjective involvement (first-person’s perspective). This method provides specifically to musicians/researchers an easier access to music performance analysis. Furthermore, with the implementation of a transdisciplinary and collaborative practice (with the composer, the Indians singer and dancer) plus the aid of technology with the motion and audio analysis, the actual study adds an alternative perspective concerning the exploration and the design of new paths within the field of artistic research
Effects of adaptive-tempo music-based RAS for Parkinson’s disease patients
Full text linkThe use of Rhythmic Auditory Stimulation (RAS) is a potential method to help Parkinson Patients improve their gait characteristics. By providing auditory stimuli such as a metronome or music, gait impairments, which characterize the illness, tend to improve without pharmacological or surgical intervention. This work evaluates three different RAS approaches: fixed-tempo metronomes, fixed-tempo music and adaptive-tempo music. 29 Parkinson Disease (PD) patients were tested in a repeated measures experiment to compare spatiotemporal gait parameters in different cueing conditions. Baseline measures without RAS were taken, followed by counterbalanced trials of the three RAS methods. Compared to the baseline, beneficial effects were found for all RAS types. Fixed-tempo metronomes resulted in the highest increase for cadence, velocity and stride length, fixed-tempo music increased velocity and stride length, and adaptive-tempo music increased stride length. However, metronomes lowered the fractal scaling value compared to the baseline, possibly increasing the risk for falling, while adaptive music increased the fractal scaling to healthy levels, reducing the risk for falling. These promising results suggest that rhythmical auditory stimuli based on music might have an advantage over metronomes that may hold benefits for treatment of Parkinson’s disease
Regularity and asynchrony when tapping to tactile, auditory and combined pulses
Full text linkThis research is carried out with the aim to develop assistive
technology that helps users following the beat in music, which is of
interest to cohchlear implant users. The envisioned technology would
use tactile feedback on each musical beat. However, this raises
fundamental questions about uni- and cross-modal perception which
are not addressed in similar context in the literature. The aim of this
study was i) to find out how well users are able to follow tactile
pulses. ii) To gain insights in the differences between auditory,
tactile and combined auditory-tactile feedback. A tapping experiment
was organized with 27 subjects. They were requested to tap along
with an auditory pulse, a tactile pulse and a combined auditory-tactile
pulse in three different tempi. An evaluation with respect to
regularity and asynchrony followed. Subjects were found to perform
significantly better in terms of reqularity and asynchrony for the
auditory and auditory/tactile condition with respect to the tactile only
condition. Mean negative asynchrony (MNA) for auditory and
combined (auditory and tactile) conditions were in the range of
previous studies. The MNA’s for the tactile conditions showed a
remarkable dependence on tempo. In the 90BPM condition a clear
anticipation (-20ms) was reported, for the 120BPM condition the
mean was around zero, the 150BPM condition showed a positive
MNA (a reaction vs anticipation). An effect that could be
encorporated into the design of an assistive technology
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