Effort-based Analysis of Bowing Movements: Evidence of Anticipation Effects

Anticipatory behaviours are known to occur in music performance, notably on the control movements of instruments such as piano or drums. We studied such effects on bowed string movements, corresponding to a case where the control on sound is continuous. Movements were measured with an optical motion capture system combined with sensors on the bow. Bowing movements were analysed and compared on the basis of underlying effort costs, determined from their velocity profiles. Precisely, we used movement models that assume that jerk or impulse are minimized. These models were synthesized based on measurement data and then compared to velocity and acceleration profiles. Results on various musical cases involving separate strokes, scales, mixed bowing techniques and rhythms showed that this methodology can account, to some extent, for the different effort strategies used by the players. The presented modelling provides evidence of anticipatory behaviour during bowing movements. Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge Professor Paolo Viviani for interesting discussions. We also would like to thank Marcelo Wanderley, Matthias Demoucron, Norbert Schnell and René Caussé for contributions to this work and for fruitful collaborations. We also acknowledge support of the project CONSONNES funded by the ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche, France). This work was partly funded by the European project i-Maestro IST-026883 (www.i-maestro.org). Notes 1The analytical expressions for minimum jerk models are generally found from dynamical optimization.