Abstract:

Music listening is often associated with spontaneous body movements, frequently synchronized with the musical beat. While there exists an extensive body of work on synchronization of tapping, spontaneous movements to music have been investigated to a much lesser extent. The present study investigated the kinematic and kinetic aspects of spontaneous movements using a high-resolution motion-capture system. Various kinematic variables were estimated from the data, while body-segment modeling was utilized to obtain estimates of kinetic variables, such as forms of mechanical energy as well as instantaneous power produced during the movements. Although the participants produced a wide variety of movement patterns, some commonalities between them were found. On the kinematic level, it was found that musical beat was most clearly represented by movements in the vertical direction. On the kinetic level, the instantaneous internal power of the body showed clear peaks at the instants of musical beat. The results indicate that, regardless of the wide variety of spontaneous movement patterns, musical beat tends to be associated with bursts of instantaneous muscular power. This could suggest that the perception of the temporal structure of music is associated with imitation-based corporeal representations.