Body, Sound and Space in Music and Beyond: Multimodal Explorations
SEMPRE Studies in The Psychology of Music Series

Body and space refer to vital and interrelated dimensions in the experience of sounds and music. Sounds have an overwhelming impact on feelings of bodily presence and inform us about the space we experience. Even in situations where visual information is artificial or blurred, such as in virtual environments or certain genres of film and computer games, sounds may shape our perceptions and lead to surprising new experiences. This book discusses recent developments in a range of interdisciplinary fields, taking into account the rapidly changing ways of experiencing sounds and music, the consequences for how we engage with sonic events in daily life and the technological advancements that offer insights into state-of-the-art methods and future perspectives. Topics range from the pleasures of being locked into the beat of the music, perception?action coupling and bodily resonance, and affordances of musical instruments, to neural processing and cross-modal experiences of space and pitch. Applications of these findings are discussed for movement sonification, room acoustics, networked performance, and for the spatial coordination of movements in dance, computer gaming and interactive artistic installations.

List of figures

List of tables

Series editors’ preface

Notes on contributors

1 Introduction: structured sounds in bodily and spatial dimensions

Clemens Wöllner

Part I

Bodily movements, gestures and sonification

2 The empowering effects of being locked into the beat of the music

Marc Leman, Jeska Buhmann and Edith Van Dyck

3 Exploring music-related micromotion

Alexander Refsum Jensenius

4 Cross-modal experience of musical pitch as space and motion: current research and future challenges

Zohar Eitan

5 Gestural qualities in music and outward bodily responses

Clemens Wöllner and Jesper Hohagen

6 Aesthetics of sonification: taking the subject-position

Paul Vickers, Bennett Hogg and David Worrall

Part II

Sound design, instrumental affordances and embodied spatial perception

7 Instruments, voices, bodies and spaces: towards an ecology of performance

W. Luke Windsor

8 Sonic spaces in movies: audiovisual metaphors and embodied meanings in sound design

Kathrin Fahlenbrach

9 The colourful life of timbre spaces: timbre concepts from early ideas to meta-timbre space and beyond

Christoph Reuter and Saleh Siddiq

10 ‘Music as fluid architecture’: investigating core regions of the spatial brain

Christiane Neuhaus

Part III

Presence and immersion in networked and virtual spaces

11 Music as artificial environment: spatial, embodied multimodal experience

Peter Lennox

12 Music perception and performance in virtual acoustic spaces

Jude Brereton

13 Space and body in sound art: artistic explorations in binaural audio augmented environments

Martin Rumori

14 Embodiment and disembodiment in networked music performance

Georg Hajdu

15 Presence through sound

Mark Grimshaw

Index

Clemens Wöllner is Professor of Systematic Musicology at the University of Hamburg, Germany. His research focuses on performance, multimodal perception and the acquisition of expert skills, employing a range of interdisciplinary methods including motion capture, eye-tracking and physiological measures. He has published widely on topics related to musical conducting, perception–action coupling, human movement, imagery and attention in pianists, empathy and research reflexivity.