A Pilot Study of Expressive Body Movement on Audio Parameters of Piano Performances

Body movement plays an important role in music performances and is widely studied by researchers. However, how the expressive body movement and audio parameters change while trying to maintain consistent musical expressive intentions have not been answered. In this paper, a pilot experiment was designed to explore the objective changes in body movement and audio parameters under three expressive body movement conditions: deadpan, normal, and exaggerated. Through audio and motion data analysis, the results showed that changes in expressive body movement can affect the tempo and dynamics of music. In addition, head movement was the most affected body part under different body movement conditions, but the wrists are hardly affected. Lastly, we proposed that the difficulty of the music may have an impact on the expressive body movement in order to achieve a similar musical expression.