Correspondence between the Body Modality of Music Students during the Listening to a Melodic Fragment and its Subsequent Sung Interpretation

Abstract

For embodied music cognition, the human body plays a determining role in musical production, perception and understanding (Leman, 2008). When listening to music, people react with accompanying movements such as clapping, head swaying or imitating the instrumental performance. The latter, known as motor-mimetic sketching, is part of what is known as playing ‘air instruments’ (Godøy, Haga and Jensenius, 2006), an instrumental mimesis where the corporal actions of the instrumental performance are recreated without having physical contact with an instrument. In this manifest behavior, one can observe essential characteristics of the covert mental images associated with the musical experience. It would be expected then that such characteristics are reflected in a real sung rendition of the same piece.