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Expert musicians portray awe-inspiring precision, timing, and phrasing and may be thought to partake in a “hive-mind.” Such a shared musical absorption is characterized by a heightened empathic relation, mutual trust, and a sense that the music “takes over,” thus uniting the performers’ musical intentions. Previous studies have found correlations between empathic concern or shared experience and cardiac synchrony (CS). We aimed to investigate shared musical absorption in terms of CS by analyzing CS in two quartets: a student quartet, the Borealis String Quartet (BSQ), and an expert quartet, the Danish String Quartet (DSQ), world-renowned for their interpretations and cohesion. These two quartets performed the same Haydn excerpt in seven conditions, some of which were designed to disrupt their absorption. Using multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis (MdRQA), we found that: (1) performing resulted in significantly increased CS in both quartets compared with resting; (2) across all conditions, the DSQ had a significantly higher CS than the BSQ; (3) the BSQ's CS was inversely correlated with the degree of disruption; 4) for the DSQ, the CS remained constant across all levels of disruption, besides one added extreme disruption—a sight-reading condition. These findings tentatively support the claim that a sense of shared musical absorption, as well as group expertise, is correlated with CS.

This paper describes the process of developing a standstill performance work using the Myo gesture control armband and the Bela embedded computing platform. The combination of Myo and Bela allows a portable and extensible version of the standstill performance concept while introducing muscle tension as an additional control parameter. We describe the technical details of our setup and introduce Myo-to-Bela and Myo-to-OSC software bridges that assist with prototyping compositions using the Myo controller.

This paper provides an overview of the process of editing the forthcoming anthology "A NIME Reader - Fifteen Years of New Interfaces for Musical Expression." The selection process is presented, and we reflect on some of the trends we have observed in re-discovering the collection of more than 1200 NIME papers published throughout the 15-year long history of the conference. An anthology is necessarily selective, and ours is no exception. As we present in this paper, the aim has been to represent the wide range of artistic, scientific, and technological approaches that characterize the NIME conference. The anthology also includes critical discourse, and through acknowledgment of the strengths and weaknesses of the NIME community, we propose activities that could further diversify and strengthen the field., Comment: 5 pages, 1 table. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, 2016

This paper describes the process of developing a shared instrument for music-dance performance, with a particular focus on exploring the boundaries between standstill vs motion, and silence vs sound. The piece Vrengt grew from the idea of enabling a true partnership between a musician and a dancer, developing an instrument that would allow for active co-performance. Using a participatory design approach, we worked with sonification as a tool for systematically exploring the dancer's bodily expressions. The exploration used a "spatiotemporal matrix", with a particular focus on sonic microinteraction. In the final performance, two Myo armbands were used for capturing muscle activity of the arm and leg of the dancer, together with a wireless headset microphone capturing the sound of breathing. In the paper we reflect on multi-user instrument paradigms, discuss our approach to creating a shared instrument using sonification as a tool for the sound design, and reflect on the performers' subjective evaluation of the instrument., Comment: Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, 2019

This paper presents an exploratory production study of Bharatanatyam, a figurative (narrative) dance. We investigate the encoding of coreference vs. disjoint reference in this dance and argue that a formal semantics of narrative dance can be modeled in line with Abusch’s (2013, 2014, 2015) semantics of visual narrative (drawing also on Schlenker’s, 2017a, approach to music semantics). A main finding of our investigation is that larger-level group-boundaries (Charnavel, 2016) can be seen as triggers for discontinuity inferences (possibly involving the dynamic shift from one salient entity to another).