Embodiment

This text was written for the festschrift for the symposium on 6 September 2024 celebrating Marc Leman’s achievements as professor of Ghent University and marking his retirement. In his seminal book Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology, Marc Leman (2008) drew up a theoretical framework that has influenced a whole new generation of researchers, myself included. Building on a long tradition of systematic musicology, combined with ecological psychology and modern technology, he convincingly set the direction for a fresh approach to scientific studies of musical experiences. In the following, I will reflect on some concepts raised in his discussion and also point out some that he did not address completely, but that have been left for others, like myself, to explore in more details. ...

I am happy to announce the publication of a follow-up study to our former paper on group dancing to EDM, and a technical paper on motion capture of groups of people. In this new study we successfully managed to track groups of 9-10 people dancing in a semi-ecological setup in our motion capture lab. We also found a lot of interesting things when it came to how people synchronize to both the music and each other. ...

We organised a small workshop on Music Information Retrieval some weeks ago, and for that I carried out a small check for the most important MIR-topics using Google Scholar. I did this by first searching for the phrase “Music Information Retrieval”, which turned up 4670 hits. Then I started adding various other phrases, and the result was as follows: “Music Information Retrieval” + “…” 3730 - audio 1990 - MIDI 544 - action 485 - motion 328 - gesture 85 - movement action gesture 45 - “motion capture” 21 - “body movement” Quite clearly, audio-based methods seems to dominate the MIR literature, while symbolic representations (e.g. MIDI) is also quite high on the list. Words like action, motion and gesture turn up some hits, but these words are quite general, and may refer to many different things. It is interesting to notice how few hits there are for “body movement” and “motion capture”. Quite clearly there is room for a lot more MIR research from an embodied perspective.