The Perception of Sound Movements as Expressive Gestures

Abstract

This paper is a preliminary attempt to investigate the perception of sound movements as expressive gestures. The idea is that if sound movement is used as a musical parameter, a listener (or a subject) should be able to distinguish among different movements and she/he should be able to group them also according to the expressive intention that a given sound movement is supposed to convey. A couple of experiments have been carried out in this direction: first the subjects had to group the stimuli according to the perceived expressive intention, then they had to reproduce the sound movement by drawing it on a tablet. Preliminary results show that subjects could consistently group the stimuli, and that they primarily used paths and legato–staccato patterns to discriminate among different sound movements/expressive intention.