Measuring Musical Engagement Using Expressive Movement and EEG Brain Dynamics

We have developed a method for studying musical engagement using simple expressive rhythmic “conducting” gestures matching the musical pulse. Expert and nonexpert participants attempted to communicate the feeling of heard musical excerpts using simple rhythmic U-shaped hand/arm “conducting” gestures that animated, in real time, the movement of a spot of light on a video display, while body motion capture and high-density electroencephalography (EEG) recorded their hand/arm movements and brain activity. The animations were intended to focus and simplify the conductors’ hand movements. A Web-based pool of viewers then rated the recorded moving-spot animations using a musical affect rating scale. Affective ratings of the musical excerpts by conductor and viewer groups were correlated. Statistically significant differences were found in both the motion capture and the EEG data between the fully “engaged” condition described earlier and a “less musically engaged” condition in which conductors concurrently performed a mental dual distractor task. A theta/alpha-band EEG power increase in or near the right parietal-temporal-occipital junction before onsets of left-to-right swings appeared only in the fully engaged condition. Our results support: (1) Musical feeling and engagement can be communicated by rhythmic musical gestures alone, even after their reduction to a simple point-light display. (2) EEG brain activity in or near the right parietal-temporal-occipital junction appears to support affective gestural communication. (3) Expressive rhythmic gesturing does not seem to interfere with musical engagement, a possible advantage over other methods used to measure emotional engagement during music listening.