The Role of a Pianist's Affective and Structural Interpretations in his Expressive Body Movement: A Single Case Study

we explored how a pianist manipulates his upper body according to his interpretation of music. We asked a professional pianist to perform artistic, deadpan, and exaggerated renditions of two structurally contrasting pieces. The pianist’s affective interpretations clearly differentiated among the three renditions. The artistic rendition, representing the true nature of the piece, was compared to the contrived deadpan and exaggerated renditions. The pianist’s range of body movement in the artistic rendition differed from the other two for a fast, energetic piece, whereas it only differed from the deadpan for a slow, romantic piece. The pianist highlighted the structural contrasts within the artistic rendition by manipulating his range of body movement and by coordinating the variations between body movement and temporal/dynamical projection of tones.

Automatic Generation of Expressive Body Movement Based on Cohen-kestenberg Lifelike Motion Stereotypes

Method of automatic choreography to generate lifelike body movements is proposed. This method is based on somatic theories that are conventionally used to evaluate human’s psychological and developmental states by analyzing body movement. This paper proposes the use of these theories in the inverse way to facilitate the generation of artificial body movements that are plausible in relation to the regarding evolutionary, developmental and emotional states of robots or other automata. This paper reviews somatic theories and describes a strategy for implementating automatic body movement generation. An additional psychological experiment is also conducted to evaluate expression ability of body movement rhythms.