Ensembility among musicians according to their swaying movements and its relationship with musical performance

Abstract

The current study examined the interaction dynamics within a small group from the perspective of movement synchrony by estimating ‘ensembility’ among musicians. In an ensemble concert, the swaying movements of three professional musicians during a live performance were recorded using a chair-type body motion sensor, the SenseChair. A short-time frequency analysis with a Hanning window function was performed to extract short-time frequency data from each musician’s movements. Ensembility; i.e., the degree of synchrony among the musicians’ swaying movements, was calculated by multiplying the three musicians’ sway data. The validity of calculating ensembility was confirmed using a surrogate technique. Furthermore, the relationship between ensembility and evaluations of the subjects’ musical performance was examined. The results showed that one of the performances that exhibited high ensembility received a higher evaluation score. While much synchrony research has focused on dyadic interactions, collaborative work with researchers from the field of social psychology and information science allows for precise examinations of the dynamics within small groups.