Abstract
Joint action is essential in daily life, as humans often must coordinate with others to accomplish shared goals. Previous studies have mainly focused on sensorimotor aspects of joint action, with measurements reflecting event-to-event precision of interpersonal sensorimotor coordination (e.g., tapping). However, while emotional factors are often closely tied to joint actions, they are rarely studied, as event-to-event measurements are insufficient to capture higher-order aspects of joint action such as emotional expression. To quantify joint emotional expression, we used motion capture to simultaneously measure the body sway of each musician in a trio (piano, violin, cello) during performances. Excerpts were performed with or without emotional expression. Granger causality was used to analyze body sway movement time series amongst musicians, which reflects information flow. Results showed that the total Granger-coupling of body sway in the ensemble was higher when performing pieces with emotional expression than without. Granger-coupling further correlated with the emotional intensity as rated by both the ensemble members themselves and by musician judges, based on the audio recordings alone. Together, our findings suggest that Granger-coupling of co-actors’ body sways reflects joint emotional expression in a music ensemble, and thus provide a novel approach to studying joint emotional expression.
Highlights
Joint action is essential to everyday life
Results showed that causal density (CD) (Granger-coupling) of body sway was correlated with the degree of emotional intensity as rated by the performers themselves
At the functional level, the correlational findings suggest an association between CD and perceived level of emotional intensity, and the Granger coupling of body sway can be an informative index to reflect joint emotional expression
Summary
Joint action is essential to everyday life. Humans regularly coordinate with each other to achieve shared goals, ranging from moving an object too heavy for one person to playing on a sports team. One study found that pianists with higher empathy scores had a better motor representation of a duet co-performer, as reflected by motor-evoked potentials[14] Together, these studies show that emotion influences sensorimotor joint action. Music ensemble performers must coordinate their actions, and their joint expressive goals[19]. Interpersonal event-to-event temporal precision has been widely used as a local index of sensorimotor aspects of joint action[22,23,24]. Relations between co-actors’ body sway have been associated with joint action performance in many domains, including engaging in motor coordination tasks[26,27], having a conversation[28,29,30], and music ensemble performance[25,31,32,33,34]. In music performance, it has been associated with melodic phrasing[35], suggesting it reflects the higher-order aspect of music performance, rather than lower-order note-to-note precision
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