Expressiveness of Musician's Body Movements in Performances on Marimba

To explore to what extent emotional intentions can be conveyed through musicians' movements, video recordings were made of a marimba player performing the same piece with the intentions Happy, Sad, Angry and Fearful. 20 subjects were presented video clips, without sound, and asked to rate both the perceived emotional content as well as the movement qualities. The video clips were presented in di erent conditions, showing the player to di erent extent. The observers' ratings for the intended emotions con rmed that the intentions Happiness, Sadness and Anger were well communicated, while Fear was not. Identi cation of the intended emotion was only slightly in uenced by the viewing condition. The movement ratings indicated that there were cues that the observers used to distinguish between intentions, similar to cues found for audio signals in music performance.