Kinematic, kinetic and perceptual analyses of piano performances

Expression is a central aspect in music performance.In order to fully understand its impact on the appreciation of the performance, it should be studied from the perspectives of the performer's body movements and audience' perception.Unfortunately, established pedagogical methods in classical piano rarely discuss strategies to integrate the movements from the whole body into structural and expressive parameters of music.This dissertation examines the interactions between the instrument, the pianist' body movements and musical expression to help further the design of enhanced science-based pedagogical approaches to be used in piano lessons.The research proposes a systematic approach to study and analyze pianists' body movements when performing different pieces from the Romantic era, based on the analysis of the expressive and biomechanical aspects of the performance, as well as on the audience' perspective.We seek to understand better: 1) the relationships between pianists' body movements, timing strategies and structural features of contrasting Romantic excerpts in terms of technical level and character; 2) the cross-modal interaction between movements and acoustic parameters in the perception of piano performances; and finally 3) the biomechanics of upper-body movements in relation to musical expression and structural characteristics.To address these questions, we combine kinematic and kinetic analyses, by means of motion capture and force plate technologies, as well as a multimodal analysis on audience' perception.First, an exploratory study was conducted with eleven pianists, each one performing a different piece from the Romantic repertoire, to evaluate the links between quantity of motion (QoM), force and the musical structure of pieces with various levels of technical difficulty, and to understand whether auditors are able to discriminate between different conditions when provided with one perceptual mode at a time (vision or sound) or both.Then, three pieces, selected from the original 11 pieces for their contrasting technical levels, styles and structural characteristics, were performed by ten different expert pianists.The experimental design was based on previous research that used different performance conditions to evaluate the effect of body movements on musical expression, and similarly the effect of different levels of expression on movements.Pianists' upper movements and postural control were investigated by measuring data derived from motion capture and force plate technologies, such as quantity, velocity and acceleration of motion, postural angles, vertical force, center of pressure (COP) displacements and velocity.iiThe results from Chapter 4 revealed that pianists' length of performance was less impacted by the QoM than by the level of expression regardless of the technical difficulty.Pianists conceive the different structural levels of a piece in similar ways, as recurrent expressive head movements across all pianists were found in specific areas of the scores.Chapter 5 showed that even slight modifications in the movements of pianists, such as acceleration and QoM of the head and torso movements, can have an impact on sound features, such as key velocity and phrasing, in a way that is perceptible for musically trained auditors.Perceptual and acoustical impact on expressive features, as key velocity and phrasing differed between a normal condition and an immobile condition.However, as Chapter 6 demonstrated, mentally restraining the movements does not impair pianists' postural control, as the COP displacements were not affected, whereas playing with an exaggerated level of expression may affect stability.These findings show that incorporating a more scientific approach in piano lessons that consider kinematic, kinetic, perceptual and expressive aspects of pianists' performances, can lead to the design of a coherent pedagogical framework better adapted to students' individual needs, centered on the development of students' communicative skills and the integration of the whole body movements.

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