How musicians communicate non-verbally during performance?

A team of researchers from McMaster University has discovered a new technique to examine how musicians intuitively coordinate with one another during a performance, silently predicting how each will express the music.

The findings, published today in the journal Scientific Reports, provide new insights into how musicians synchronize their movements so they are playing exactly in time, as one single unit.

“Successfully performing music with a group is a highly complex endeavor,” explains Laurel Trainor, the senior author on the study and director of the LIVELab at McMaster University where the work was conducted.

“How do musicians coordinate with each other to perform expressive music that has changes in tempo and dynamics? Accomplishing this relies on predicting what your fellow musicians will do next so that you can plan the motor movements so as to express the same emotions in a coordinated way. If you wait to hear what your fellow musicians will do, it is too late,” she says.

Source: Researchers examine how musicians communicate non-verbally during performance