Effect of tempo and vision on interpersonal coordination of timing in dyadic performance

Paper in proceedings, 2015

Interpersonal coordination within a dyadic musical performance requires that the two musicians share a similar mental model of the music’s timing structure. In addition to non-fluctuating inter-onset-interval, matched mental models can be observed through corporeal articulations and apparent embodiment of musical features (i.e. synchronous body sway, mimicked or complementary gestures). Our aim was to examine the effect of tempo on interpersonal coordination within a musical dyad. Violin dyads performed three unfamiliar collaborative musical sequences in facing vs. non-facing conditions. Our hypotheses were that interpersonal coordination would be weakened in the non-facing conditions, and that synchronization would be affected by both very slow and very fast tempi. The current paper reports the project’s initial and general findings. We present results relating to the dyads’ ability to synchronize and have performed tests on the motion capture data to examine how movement patterns change between the front- and back-facing conditions.