About the project
Across music traditions worldwide, vocalists tend to gesture as they sing, using hand, head and wider bodily movement. While existing research has provided insight into how performers’ gestures affect audiences, there is little work on how gesturing affects vocalists themselves.?
For example, does co-singing gesturing have an impact on performers’ vocal production, interpretation, or sense of connection with the music?
SongGesture will explore these questions across three musical traditions:
- Karnatak music from South India
- Beatboxing
- European art song
The project will collaborate closely with performers from these traditions and share results with wider communities of vocalists through workshops and other events.
Objectives
SongGesture aims to significantly advance knowledge on how expert vocalists use gesture in support of their performance goals.
Building on recent research showing that gesturing has an impact on simultaneous vocalization, the project will advance the theorization of gesture-vocalization relations in musical contexts by also considering the physical interactions between gesture and vocal production movements, such as breathing and articulation. Interaction between gesture and vocalization will be explored using ethnographic, experimental and multimodal analytical approaches.
Beyond academia, the research aims to be of use to vocal performers, providing greater insight into how and why their gesturing can affect their vocalizations.
Research Questions
RQ1: What are vocalists’ perspectives and experiences regarding their own co-singing gesturing?
- Approaches: ethnographic interviews; sociocultural contextualization
RQ2: How do vocalists’ gestures affect their own vocal performance, and when gesture is manipulated, how do vocalists physically adjust to achieve their performance goals?
- Approaches: experimental manipulation of gesture and vocalization; performance research; phenomenological interviews
RQ3: How do vocalists’ gestures correspond with their vocalizations and what are the implications of this for multimodal meaning-making?
- Approaches: computational and qualitative multimodal analysis; semiotic analysis
