Communicating expressive intentions with a single piano note

Abstract

We analysed how expressive intentions are communicated and perceived in a special context of musical production: improvisation on a single piano note. Two experiments were designed in order to find relations between performer's expressive intentions, four acoustical parameters (pitch, intensity, articulation and rhythmic density), and listener's perception of expressive content. Differences between musicians and non-musicians were analysed as well. In the first experiment, 6 performers (3 musicians and 3 non-musicians) improvised on a digital piano according to 8 expressive intentions. The experiment was planned in 4 phases, progressively limiting the musical means available to the performer. In all phases, improvisations were limited to only one piano note. In the second experiment, listeners described performer's improvisations by means of adjective ratings. Results support the position that few low level parameters, mainly intensity and rhythmic density, are important factors in the communication of expressive content from the performer to the listener and that listeners recognize most expressive intentions even when very few acoustical parameters are used.

Acknowledgements

We thank Professor Sergio Canazza (University of Udine, Italy) for his useful comments, Professor Carolyn Drake (Paris V University, France) for supervising the data analysis, the IRCAM (Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique Musique, Paris, France), for the technical aid in experiment 2, and those who kindly volunteered to participate in the study.

Notes

¹The expression “acoustical parameters” is used in the present study also for articulation, which is generally considered as a musical parameter. For “rhythmic density” we refer here to the mean value number of notes per second.

²This approach was inspired by the work that Laban and Lawrence (1947, Theory of Effort) carried out in another context. Laban and Lawrence believed that the expressive content of every physical movement is mainly related to the way of performing it, and it is due to the variation of four basic factors: time, space, weight and flow. The authors defined as basic efforts the eight combinations of two values (quick/sustained, flexible/direct and strong/light) associated with the first three factors. Each combination gives rise to a specific expressive gesture to which is associated an adjective.

³The 260 ms value was chosen, after a laboratory test, as a reasonably short duration of a note in order to perceive separately two notes played as fast as possible.

⁴The ANOVA test requires a normal distribution of the data. The Kolmogorov – Smirnov test reported a probability of the Z statistic p > 0.10 for each set of data, meaning that the distribution is not significantly different from the normal distribution.

⁵The normal distribution of each set of data was verified by means of the Kolmogorov – Smirnov test (the probability of the Z statistic is p > 0.13).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Antonio Rodà

†Antonio Rodà is now at MIRAGE Laboratory, University of Udine, Italy.