Why Live Music

In the previous post I talked about some advantages of acoustic music over amplified music, and in this one want to talk a little about live music versus recorded music.

One of the things the neuroscientists often say about what pulls the listener into the music is the unexpected. While we like some sense of structure to give us context, if there are no surprises along the way, we become bored. The thing about recorded music is that once you've heard it, it never changes. The first time or two I hear one of Glenn Gould's immaculately edited, so as to be error free, recordings of Bach, I'm amazed. On subsequent listenings, though, the some of the magic slips away. I often use the word "fresh" for music that I like, and recorded music can never sound fresh on repeated listenings.

Live performances usually mean finger slips along the way, but they also mean that you'll never hear that piece of music played that way ever again, and that in itself adds excitement. Over the years I've noticed some classical critics will point out errors in a performance, while going on to say that's what you get with live performance, and that even with an error here and there, live music is more moving to the listener than recordings.

Another thing about live performance is that the audience makes a difference. Years I ago came across this quote by Hilary Hahn:

The problem is that acoustic performers rely on the audience's attention and focus and can tell when the audience isn't mentally present. Your listening is part of our interpretive process. If you're not really listening, we're not getting the feedback of energy from the hall, and then we might as well be practicing for a bunch of people peering in the window. It's just not as interesting when the cycle of interpretation is broken.

Another aspect of watching live performance is the triggering of mirror neurons. When we see the physical gestures musicians make, we "feel" those motions in ourselves, and often associate emotions with those gestures. 

Roger Sessions on Gesture

Around the time I wrote this post on some audience members telling me they were deeply moved by music I've written, I came across this post of Elaine Fine's over on her blog Musical Assumptions In Sessions' book The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener he writes:

I believe that music "expresses" something very definite, and that it expresses it in the most precise way. In embodying movement, in the most subtle and most delicate manner possible, it communicates the attitudes inherent in, and implied by, that movement; its speed, its energy, its élan or impulse, its tenseness or relaxation, its agitation or its tranquility, its decisiveness or its hesitation. It communicates in a marvelously vivid and exact way the dynamics and the abstract qualities of emotion, but any specific emotional content the composer wishes to give to it must be furnished, as it were, from without, by means of an associative program. Music not only "expresses" movement, but embodies, defines, and qualifies it. Each musical phrase is a unique gesture and through the cumulative effect of such gestures we gain a clear sense of a quality of feeling behind them. But unless the composer directs our associations along definite lines, as composers of all times, to be sure, have frequently done, it will be the individual imagination of the listener, and not the music itself, which defines the emotion. What the music does is to animate the emotion; the music, in other words, develops and moves on a level that is essentially below the level of conscious emotion. Its realm is that of emotional energy rather than that of emotion in the specific sense.

I've always thought that one way music "touches" us is that it is in part physical gesture made audible. Sessions' point elaborates this in a way I hadn't really thought of. The way I take it is that a successful musical gesture is a sort of mini-archetype of an emotion that allows the listener to re-experience and/or to more fully experience an emotion in the moment the music is made, and in such a way that the feeling lingers. 

This goes a good way towards explaining how others feel emotions in my music I didn't consciously put there. If the music is well made, the gestures in it will elicit emotions in audience members that are specific to each person; and the better made the gestures are, the stronger the emotions.

One way of thinking about it is that a piece of music is like the script to a play, and each audience member casts and directs his/her own production of that play in their imagination, and no two of those productions will be exactly alike. In Swafford's new biography of Beethoven he mentions that Beethoven often had a plot line of his own for pieces of his music, but he never shared them with others, so that they could imagine/feel their own.

Great Neuroscience Article

This article in Nautilus pulls together things in the neuroscience of music and takes us another conceptual step toward more fully understanding the ways music affects us. 

The main idea is that music can be, and usually is, a social activity, even when you're listening alone - which is a great way to think about mirror neurons and how important they are. This is the first time I've seen someone say just listening to music, without seeing it performed, can trigger mirror neurons. Given my idea that music is in part physical gesture made audible, it's great validation.

Something else that I think is helpful is the use of "pre-cognitive" in the explanation, which may be a better term than "non-conscious", a term I've used to say the same thing.

There's also a wonderful working definition of what music is. 

Here is a long snip from the article:

Music is as much a part of human evolution as language, tool-making, and cognitive development, Schulkin and Raglan tell us. It’s a bridge. “Music is typically something shared, something social; we may sing in the shower or on a solitary walk, but music is most of the time social, communicative, expressive, and oriented toward others,” Schulkin and Raglan write.

Molnar-Szakacs explains the brain’s mirror-neuron system provides the neural basis of music’s social powers. The properties of the human mirror-neuron system are based on research showing that the same regions in our brain are active when we perform, see, or hear an action. The “mirror” regions of our brains fire whether we’re playing the guitar or listening to Pete Townshend play it.

The mirror-neuron system, Molnar-Szakacs says, “allows someone to identify with another by providing an automatic, pre-cognitive mechanism by which to understand their actions by mapping them onto our own neural representations of those actions. In addition, it represents the intention behind those actions.”

The moment you hear a sequence of hierarchically organized abstract sounds we call music, a multitude of associations are activated in your brain. These can include memories, emotions, and even motor programs for playing music. Together they can imply a sense of human agency. That sensation is what sets music apart from other types of sounds. “The brain interprets the structure of the music as intentionality that is coming from a human agent,” Molnar-Szakacs says. “This, combined with all the associations evoked by the music, is what makes the experience social.”

There's more to the article, it's all interesting, and it's all worth reading. 

Eckhart Ensemble 2015

The Eckhart Ensemble returned to Orange this year and gave a wonderful performance, as they did last year. Many thanks to the Orange Music Society for making this gift to the community. Here is the capsule review I put on their Facebook page the morning after:

The concert in Orange tonight was splendid - there were all the technical things you could hope for - intonation, phrasing, dynamics, ensemble unity - but it's the enthusiasm and love of music making coming through at every moment that make this group really special. And the Italian Renaissance music bowled over both experienced listeners and people previously unfamiliar with it. Bravo!

Nicolas Duchamp on flute, the guest soloist, was terrific. In particular, I've never heard such strength of tone in the low and mid register. Everyone else was excellent as well, but I want to mention Fred Dole on bass. He was also a standout last year. His sound fills the room and gives a solid foundation to the music I can feel as well as hear.

Someone else to mention, who wasn't with them last year, is Giustino Riccio the percussionist for the Renaissance tunes. Besides wearing a feathered cap straight from a Renaissance painting, his percussion on various instruments was superb. I've never seen one performer watch other performers with such intensity so as to better support them with his playing.

With all the hubbub about the death of classical music and what can be done to get audiences more interested, these people have some answers:

1) Except for the cellos and harpsichordist - they all stood while playing and moved with their music making. As regular readers of the blog know, I think l lot of the power of music is that it is, in part, physical gesture made audible. Seeing players moving their entire body while making music emphasizes that aspect - and I think it helps communicate more of the music to the audience than sitting and moving as little as possible, giving the impression of robots.

2) They dressed individually and comfortably, which besides letting them look like people instead of penguins, gave a hint of the personalities behind the instruments, giving more context to the music making.

3) They were obviously having fun! As I've said about my group, when you're having fun making music, that transmits to the audience as well as the music. There's something contagious about people having fun that adds a whole dimension to music making.

3) They're mostly (from my perspective, anyway) young people and have the enthusiasm of the young and that also comes through in the music.

4) The programming of the Renaissance tunes was a master stroke. The immediacy of the music spoke both to experienced and novice listeners of classical music. One of the most experienced listeners was visibly swept away by "Belicha". And a family member I'd encouraged to go, who is not a regular listener to classical music, was one of the initiators of the standing ovation.

5) One minor point that may be more important than it seems at first - lots of alto range instruments in the Renaissance music - English horns (including a trio of them at one point!), violas and alto flute. I have a number of friends, all women as it happens, that simply do not like high treble sounds. My guess is that these same tunes played up a fifth or an octave would not have been as appealing to a number of folks.

To close, a phrase from perhaps the most experienced listener of classical music at the concert:

They played with heart from the heart.


ADDED LATER: After writing this post have thought of at least a dozen things I didn't mention. I could have gone around the entire group of players and talked about instances of their great individual and ensemble music making - every single one of them. 

And to amend my comment on some people not liking high treble sounds. During one of the Renaissance dances there was a piccolo duet. I've never heard one piccolo played so well in tune, much less two together. It was an astonishing moment. If all treble sounds were played that well, I don't think they'd be so associated with shrillness. Anecdotal proof of that being one of the people I know to dislike high treble sounds later commented on how amazing that duet was.

Proprioception and Emotions

I've posted on proprioception in the sense of one's awareness of the physical aspects of music making. There can also be an emotional component, as sometimes the physical gesture used to create the sound can mimic a gesture that can communicate emotion non-musically, e.g. caressing the piano keys to suggest a physical caress.

This article about Jesse Prinz says this about one of his books:

His 2004 book, Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Oxford University Press), follows William James in arguing that emotions are perceptions of bodily responses to cues in our environment, which they follow rather than precede.

If this is to any degree part of what's going on (and I've never heard of this being something James talked about), it means that we are both sending and receiving emotional cues at the proprioceptive level, both consciously and non-consciously. 

Music Via Gesture

Here's a glimpse of one of the futures of music making. 

Categorizing Emotions

Manfred Clynes - who invented the CAT scan and who spent quality time with both Yehudi Menuhin and Pablo Casals - categorized the range emotions as:

no-emotion, anger, hate, grief, love, sexual desire, joy, and reverence.

In his book Sentics he describes the button-like device he had people manipulate to emulate these emotions. Being Australian, he was able to do this with Aboriginal people as well as descendants of the European settlers, and found these emotions manifested with very similar physical parameters for both groups.

In these two recent articles talking about the same research looking at emotions conveyed by facial expressions, the categories they use are:

happy, sad, fearful, angry, surprised and disgusted

There's some, but not complete, overlap between the two. In both cases, though, the connection between emotions and physical gestures is made. My idea is that emotions are encoded in music via the physical gestures making the music, along with the analog of physical gestures in the phrasing and articulation.

I think that music "touches" us, in part, due to the gestural qualities embedded in it. Evolution has given us a very finely tuned ability to read gestures of those around us, and music taps into that. 

To my mind, that's the simplest explanation as to why live performance is so much more effective than a recording - our visual input amplifies what we're hearing.

Dance Gestures

This article is brief, but the animations are worth a thousand words. The title of the article is, What women want on the dance floor, according to science. Some dance gestures are more attractive than others. My sense is that this is also the case for gestures made while making music, some of which are embedded aurally in the music. And when watching a music performance we don't generally spend all our time trying to logically deduce the meanings of gestures - we simply react to them as we do watching these animations.

Performance Diary

Four of us - trumpet, clarinet, tuba and me on banjo/guitar and a few vocals did a Mardi Gras performance in a local French restaurant - and then last Saturday we did some hymns as a five piece brass choir (trumpet, flugelhorn, horn, trombone, Eb tuba) for the prelude and postlude to a funeral in the Presbyterian church, and then followed up with Dixieland jazz with the full group at the reception in the fellowship hall following the service.

Following the Mardi Gras performance someone who had been there - who probably attends more live music than just about anyone I know - sent a note containing the following: "Whenever you play beyond the music is a sense of communitas." It's the most gratifying comment I've ever gotten about my public music making. 

I've posted from time to time about the Buddhist notion that it's one's motivation that makes any action/karma positive, neutral, or negative. I've also said from time to time I'm convinced one reason people enjoy our playing is that it's obvious how much fun we're having and that the fun is contagious. That an audience member divined the music therapy behind the performance feels like a terrific accomplishment.

One thing that I think conveyed that feeling was my memorizing a number of tunes and then walking out amongst the tables with the banjo and singing. A highlight of that was a little girl - say four or five - who started clapping along, and then some adults did as well. 

Another thing that helped was that I always play the banjo/guitar while standing up and sort of dance with the rhythms. Back in the days of running music therapy groups with emotionally disturbed children, that's essentially how I conducted. All the extra physical gestures seem to heighten the effect of the music.

Having a smaller combo for the Mardi Gras performance helped us play better as well. We were all more exposed than we are with the full group and had to work to get a good sound.

Another factor was working with the hostess to play tunes she liked. A lot of bands have a set list and when you ask them to play - that's what you get. What we do is talk to the host to get an idea of what they want and then tailor our performance for that specific event. It's sort of like working up a music therapy treatment plan, and when done well contributes greatly to the overall success of the performance.

For the brass choir at the funeral (of a man who has been a lawyer in town all my life and with whose children I grew up) I just took the hymns they requested and put them in four parts with minimal tweaking. To my ear, simple four part harmony played by brass is one of the most glorious things in all music making.

The Dixieland jazz at the reception just made people happy. I don't know of any other genre that has that effect for so many people.

Gestures and Sound Shapes

When I saw this article with photos and info on visual shapes created by human gestures, e.g.:

I was reminded of the shapes created by sound waves, e.g.:

It could be just coincidence, due in part to three dimensional movement reduced to two dimensions. At the least, though, it's a reminder that music and music making have an affinity with sculpture.

Gesture and Learning

In this post over on the musician's brain Lois Svard talks about what I would call the gestural component to learning. Basically, if you get you whole body to feel the rhythms and gestures in the music you're making, more parts of the brain are involved and the learning goes deeper and lasts longer. 

Down in my comment I mentioned mirror neurons and she knows what they are and agrees they're important ("convinced that understanding them is key to learning and performance") - so she's got my full attention. 

Music and Movement

Looks like the world is getting closer to catching up with Manfred Clynes and his "sentics".

Music(al) Stretches

Sound and time are the two primal ingredients of music, and a word we use for each is rooted in the act of physically stretching something. 

Tone comes from Middle English: from Old French ton, from Latin tonus, from Greek tonos 'tension, tone, from teinein 'to stretch" -  Oxford American Dictionary.

Pace comes from Middle English: from Old French pas, from Latin passus "stretch (of the leg)', from pandere "to stretch'. -  Oxford American Dictionary.

Stretching is something the human body does all the time, from waking in the morning to standing on tiptoes reaching for a top shelf, so we all have a built in somatic sense of some stretches being easy and others being extreme and everything in between. 

The most deep seated stretching we do is extending and relaxing the diaphragm with every breath. We do it one way when we're relaxed, and another when we're anxious. 

Since it's my contention that a lot of music's power to move us is due it its encoding physical gestures (and associated feelings), I feel the ways in which music can mimic physical stretches (and associated feelings) has a lot to do with the feelings a piece of music might evoke. It's so easy to get caught up in the surface issues of music making, we can sometimes forget there's this deeper gestural substrate that's communicating to an audience in a mostly non-conscious way.

A key component of physical stretches is that they always have an arc from not being stretched to being fully stretched and back again. You can't make yourself stop breathing and you can't hold a body stretch forever. So besides the degree of a stretch at it's fullest, from barely stretched to full or over extension, there's the way each stretch builds to a peak and then relaxes.

"Tension and release" is a phrase often used in talking about music, and for me, understanding that in the context just laid out gives it a richer meaning. 

"Balance" is another word often used in talking about music making, but I've never really liked it because I always get the extremely two dimensional image of scales tipping one way or another, whereas stretching is complex and our sense of it springs directly from our proprioception.

I often ask students if they've ever been around someone who has lots of interesting things to say, but whose voice is so off putting it's hard to pay full attention, -  that's the substrate I'm talking about. If their voice tone suggests either a string stretched to the breaking point or barely tuned up to pitch, and if the pacing is either to fast or too slow, the words they say will may not register as well as they might. 

On the other hand, if the gestural substrate of your music making matches up well with what you're trying to express, there's a much better chance of connecting with an audience.

A Moving Performance

Greg Sandow has been for years talking up the idea of fresh presentations of classical music and in this post he gives a link to the following video of someone trying just that. Given my notion of the importance of gesture, I find this performance delightful. And it could be just me, but that they've memorized the piece makes the playing, both solo and ensemble, both free and unified. I find myself not connecting to great swathes of classical music -  appreciating, but not connecting. This performance really makes the connection.

Quotes to Save

A neuroscientist:

What music do you play most often in your lab or car?

We listen to the "music" of the brain all the time in the lab. My favorite station is Jazz 88. I cannot help but listen to music the way I analyze large-scale brain activity, searching for the syntactical rules that allow separation of messages and long-term features to be predicted from short time scale interactions. The esthetic features of music emerge from its complexity — a halfway state between trivial predictability and random noise (i.e., pink noise) – just like the complex features of brain dynamics.

Glenn Campbell has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and one of his band members says:

"The style he's been playing does not sit in his memory, it sits in his muscles and his emotions which he will always remember. [It] is quite astonishing to see how deep music sits - it's not just your brain, it's emotions in your flesh and spirit,"

Alex Ross uses the word "gesture" talking about the music of Liszt:

Freire, who has long given life to the old cliché "poet of the piano," has a way of connecting Liszt's gestures so that they form a naturally flowing narrative; you never feel hectored.

Baroque Gesture

In this Pliable post about a now deleted CD, he writes:

As Benjamin Schweitzer explains in the CD booklet, "...there is something in the gestures and tonality of [Baroque music], which is closer to modern times than one would assume in the first place".

Given my interest in the gestural component of music I was delighted to see someone actually using the word, particularly in association with Baroque music, as pieces requiring just three or four voices from Water Music, Music for the Royal Fireworks, A Musical Offering and Anna Magdalena's Notebook have been mainstays of my music making for decades. 

Most of my favorite classical music is that written before 1750. It's still connected to people actually dancing, which is where a lot of the gestural component originates. It's also from a time before equal temperament took over and before the various rules and regulations of music writing that brought an end to the simpler, but to my ear very rich, modal harmonies and less uniform metrical structures.

Here's another quote from the same source which I like, because as a music therapist I'm much more interested in how individuals can express themselves than in conforming to the standard practice styles laid down by academics.

'Sound experiments are part of daily life for a baroque orchestra. Because more so than their "modern" cousins, historical instruments offer numerous possibilities for sounds that are equally valid.'

Moving Making Music

In this post Greg Sandow is talking about the culture of music making in high level orchestras and he tells this anecdote:

After a Berlin Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall a few years ago, I ran into a musician from the New York Philharmonic whom I happened to know. Berlin, I think, is all but universally acknowledged to be the world's beset -- and most inspiring -- orchestra, an institution run by its musicians, who show great commitment and great autonomy while they play, not least in the way they move, putting their entire bodies into every note.

"Did you see that?" the Philharmonic musician asked me, almost levitating (as, I think, we all were, from how wonderfully the musicians played). "Did you see how they move? If I moved like that, I'd be reprimanded."

I play much better standing up, whether guitar and singing or flute or horn. Besides being able to breathe better and more naturally, standing up allows me to move as I play. Working with music therapy groups over the years, and now fronting the Kenwood Players, I don't conduct, but lead through gesture, along with verbal instructions half sung with the music. 

When I see players sitting stock still when making music it makes me think the music is too abstract and too far removed from the motions and gestures that make us human. Cerebral music, like say a Bach four part organ fugue, usually doesn't engage me (The Art of the Fugue being a major exception).

On the other hand, I think we've all seen people making music with far more physical gestures than needed, as if those gestures can make up for the lack of technique needed for the music being performed. Like everything else in music, a balance needs to be found.

Music and Evolution

Mark Changizi is an "evolutionary neurobiologist" and has a brand new book out called Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man. Because what he seems to be saying overlaps so nicely with my idea that physical gesture is a primal constituent of music, the book jumps to the top of my to read list.

Here are some excerpts from an interview published in today's WSJ:

. . . My research suggests that when we listen to music without any visual component, our auditory system—or at least the lower-level auditory areas—"thinks" it is the sounds of a human moving in our midst, doing some sort of behavior, perhaps an emotionally expressive behavior.

The auditory system "thinks" this because music has been "designed" by cultural evolution to sound like people moving about. That is, over time, humans figured out how to better and better make sounds that mimicked (and often exaggerated) the fundamental kinds of sounds humans make when we move. . . 

 . . . Just to give one example of a fit between music and movement, consider that when people move faster (i.e., have greater tempo), their Doppler shifts are amplified, and so the difference between the highest (going toward you) pitch and the lowest (going away from you) pitch is greater. If music sounds like moving people, then we expect that faster tempo music should have melodies with a greater pitch range. And, indeed, that's what we found in our data. . . .

. . . Not all music induces dancing. What one wants to explain is why any music should induce this (and yet no other kind of thing induces movement time-locked to it).

If music has come to sound like someone moving in your midst, and probably moving evocatively in some way, then it is not very surprising. Lots of human behaviors are contagious. Dancing amounts to just another case of humans moving in reaction to, or following, the behavior of other humans. . . 

Two previous posts on Changizi are here and here. I really think he's on to something, but wonder if he's overstating his case. On down the line, when I've had a chance to actually read the book, will post again. 

Update - Jonathan West wanted to make the following comment, but Blogger, which has been more than a little buggy lately, keeps being stuck in "preview" rather than "post", so here is the comment as Jonathan emailed it:

I'm seriously skeptical.

First, the Doppler explanation just doesn't hold water at all. At the speeds unassisted humans move about, doppler effects on sound are all but undetectable to the human ear. That is why the Doppler effect wasn't discovered until the 19th century, when we started having machines (i.e. railroad engines) that could move fast enough for doppler effects to be heard.

Also, the conclusion that faster music has a wider pitch range I would want to examine very closely. What music was chosen in order to make the comparison? How was the sampling scheme set up? What kinds of music were included (or excluded) and why?

It sounds very much as if a superically plausible theory (doppler effect) was dreamt up, and then the data (different kinds of music) cherry-picked to match. Unless you take great care to prevent it, this sort of thing can happen without any intent to deceive anybody.

That there is a link between music and movement is beyond doubt. How much of it is culturally determined and how much is genetic is an interesting question - but I suspect that the answer, when it finally appears, will be to the effect that it is all intertwined to an extent that makes it hard to describe the contributions in terms of proportions.

Empathy and Proprioception

This article in Forbes (there's an ad that you have to click through) is one of several in the past six months or so talking about research indicating the use of botox can weaken one's empathy for others. 

“When the facial muscles are dampened, you get worse in emotion perception, and when when facial muscles are amplified, you get better at emotion perception.” . . .

. . . Taken together, the two studies seem to indicate a direct relationship between ability to express emotion through facial expression, and the ability to experience emotion oneself, or identify it in others.

Seems to me there's probably a connection between this information and the new information on mirror neurons.

Large explained that when we see someone doing something, our mirror neuron system attempts to replicate the same condition in our own mind. This enables us to empathize with someone else on a very fundamental level.

The discovery that mirror neurons are involved in hearing music shows that when we listen to music, the same cells that are active in motor actions are part of the response to the music. . .

In making music, proprioception would seem to be involved as well, as that's the sense that besides telling us how physically accurate we are, it's part of how we can tell whether and how we are gesturally informing the music with emotion.

During the learning of any new skill, sport, or art, it is usually necessary to become familiar with some proprioceptive tasks specific to that activity. Without the appropriate integration of proprioceptive input, an artist would not be able to brush paint onto a canvas without looking at the hand as it moved the brush over the canvas; it would be impossible to drive an automobile because a motorist would not be able to steer or use the foot pedals while looking at the road ahead; a person could not touch type or perform ballet; and people would not even be able to walk without watching where they put their feet.

Neuroscience Roundup

This long article in the NYT is a nice summary and discussion of things I've already posted on. They even use in the title the "tickle the brain" image I've talked about before. The added value is their having interviewed Paul Simon, Yo Yo Ma and Rosanne Cash to get their responses to the data.

I really like this from Ms. Cash:

In an interview, the singer Rosanne Cash said the experiments showed that beautiful compositions and technically skilled performers could do only so much. Emotion in music depends on human shading and imperfections, “bending notes in a certain way,” Ms. Cash said, “holding a note a little longer.”

She said she learned from her father, Johnny Cash, “that your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.”

“You’ve heard plenty of great, great singers that leave you cold,” she said. “They can do gymnastics, amazing things. If you have limitations as a singer, maybe you’re forced to find nuance in a way you don’t have to if you have a four-octave range.”

And here's a quote from Dr. Large at FAU on mirror neurons:

So did the mirror neuron system, a set of brain regions previously shown to become engaged when a person watches someone doing an activity the observer knows how to do — dancers watching videos of dance, for example. But in Dr. Large’s study, mirror neuron regions flashed even in nonmusicians.

Maybe those regions, which include some language areas, are “tapping into empathy,” he said, “as though you’re feeling an emotion that is being conveyed by a performer on stage,” and the brain is mirroring those emotions.

Regions involved in motor activity, everything from knitting to sprinting, also lighted up with changes in timing and volume.

And here's something I hadn't come across, but surely reinforces my notion of the primal importance of physical gesture in musical communication.

Anders Friberg, a music scientist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, found that the speed patterns of people’s natural movements — moving a hand from one place to another on a desk or jogging and slowing to stop — match tempo changes in music that listeners rate as most pleasing.

“We got the best-sounding music from the velocity curve of natural human gestures, compared to other curves of tempos not found in nature,” Dr. Friberg said. “These were quite subtle differences, and listeners were clearly distinguishing between them. And these were not expert listeners.”