Abstract
Humans interact with other humans at a variety of timescales and in a variety of social contexts. We exhibit patterns of coordination that may differ depending on whether we are genuinely interacting as part of a coordinated group of individuals vs merely co-existing within the same physical space. Moreover, the local coordination dynamics of an interacting pair of individuals in an otherwise non-interacting group may spread, propagating change in the global coordination dynamics and interaction of an entire crowd. Dynamical systems analyses, such as Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA), can shed light on some of the underlying coordination dynamics of multi-agent human interaction. We used RQA to examine the coordination dynamics of a performance of “Welcome to the Imagination World”, composed for wind orchestra. This performance enacts a real-life simulation of the transition from uncoordinated, non-interacting individuals to a coordinated, interacting multi-agent group. Unlike previous studies of social interaction in musical performance which rely on different aspects of video and/or acoustic data recorded from each individual, this project analyzes group-level coordination patterns solely from the group-level acoustic data of an audio recording of the performance. Recurrence and stability measures extracted from the audio recording increased when musicians coordinated as an interacting group. Variability in these measures also increased, indicating that the interacting ensemble of musicians were able to explore a greater variety of behavior than when they performed as non-interacting individuals. As an orchestrated (non-emergent) example of coordination, we believe these analyses provide an indication of approximate expected distributions for recurrence patterns that may be measurable before and after truly emergent coordination.
Highlights
Humans interact with other humans at a variety of timescales and in a variety of social contexts
The recurrence plots visualize the characteristic patterns of recurrence which are quantified through recurrence quantification analysis
The current study evaluated a musical performance which enacted a real-life simulation of the transition from uncoordinated to orchestrated coordinated behavior. The musicians in this ensemble simulated the transition from disorder to order in one form of social interaction—a musical performance–by following the orchestration of the musical score, accentuated by the presence of a conductor on stage at just the time the musicians begin to play music together as a single interacting ensemble
Summary
Humans interact with other humans at a variety of timescales and in a variety of social contexts. Recent work has evaluated motor coordination dynamics of naturalistic interactions such as interactive problem solving[14,15], naturalistic conversation between individuals[16,17], speed-dating partners[18], and motor and acoustic coordination of performing musicians in d uets[5,7] and larger ensembles[6,8] In these interactions, behavioral output of each interacting individual was measured and analyzed for meaningful correlations between individuals. From the local behavior of individual audience members in order to evaluate correlation with the global signal of the audience In each of these studies, it has been possible to obtain clear measurements of individual behavior to examine the emergent coordination dynamics of multi-agent interaction and social self-organization. Alviar et al 2020 and Kello et al 2017 analysed coordination between sound and movement, and multiscale structure in orchestral music, jazz, TED talks, and even animal vocalizations through a collection of videos found on youtube (and other corpora) with ostensibly varying recording setups, number and type of microphones, e tc[21,22]
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