You just can’t stand still
Not moving to dance music is near impossible, according to new research. Read a feature story about the MICRO project.
Aims and objectives
This project sought to investigate the close relationships between musical sound and human bodily micromotion. Micromotion is here used to describe the smallest motion that we can produce and experience, typically at a rate lower than 10 mm/s.
The last decades have seen an increased focus on the role of the human body in both the performance and the perception of music. Up to now, however, the micro-level of these experiences has received little attention.
This short video describes the MICRO project when it began in 2016:
The project completed most of its planned activities and several more:
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The scientific results include many insights about human music-related micromotion. Results have been presented in one doctoral dissertation, two master theses, several journal papers, and at numerous conferences. As hypothesized, music influences human micromotion. This has been verified with different types of music in all the collected datasets. We have also found that music with a regular and strong beat, particularly electronic dance music, leads to more motion. Our data also supports the idea that music with a pulse of around 120 beats per minute is more motion-inducing than music with slower or faster tempi. In addition, we found that people generally moved more when listening with headphones. Towards the end of the project, we began studying whether there are individual differences. One study found that people who score high on empathic concern move more to music than others. This aligns with findings from recent studies of larger-scale music-related body motion.
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Data collected from the project has been released openly in Oslo Standstill Database. The database contains data from all Championships of Standstill, the Headphones-Speakers study, and from the Sverm project that preceded MICRO.
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Software developed during the project has been made openly available. This includes various analysis scrips implemented in Jupyter Notebooks. Several of the developed software modules have been wrapped up in the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python.
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The scientific results have inspired a series of artistic explorations, including several installations and performances with the Self-playing Guitars, Oslo Muscle Band, and the Micromotion Apps.
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The project and its results have been disseminated widely, including many media appearances, such as newspaper stories and several interviews on national TV and radio.
Hear PhD fellow Agata Zelechowska talk about her latest study in the MICRO project:
Research approach
The project was inspired by recent theories of embodied music cognition and has had a multidisciplinary approach. The PI’s interdisciplinary background in musicology, informatics, and the performing arts, shaped the overarching ideas of the project.
The PhD project of Agata Zelechowska was of a music psychological nature. She was in charge of the study investigating differences between headphones and speakers. She also helped shape the focus on individual differences. The postdoctoral project of Victor Gonzalez Sanchez was focused on motion capture and advanced motion analysis. His background in biomechanics and signal processing was particularly important for understanding more about the fractal nature of human micromotion. The project of researcher Finn Upham added an extra dimension by focusing on respiratory patterns, research that will continue in a new project.
Several master’s students contributed to the MICRO project through their theses and as research assistants. Ashane da Silva worked on the sonification of micromotion patterns. Mari Lesteberg has developed a series of micromotion apps with accessibility in mind. Habibur Rahman helped with developing the self-playing guitars. Bálint Laczkó, Frida Furmyr, and Marcus Widmer contributed to the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python. Augusto Dias and Pedro Lucas developed the MusicLab app for collecting micromotion data in ecological settings.
Impact
MICRO has been a basic research project, so its long-term effects remain to be seen. Some potential impacts:
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The MICRO experiments are the first to systematically study human music-related micromotion and have already gained interest in the music cognition community.
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The Oslo Standstill Database has been launched openly and according to the FAIR principles. It will hopefully be a resource for researchers in musicology, psychology, human movement science, informatics, animation, and beyond.
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The developed software, particularly the new version of the Musical Gestures Toolbox, is already in use by other researchers studying music-related body motion.
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All the media attention and artistic applications of the project have created a heightened interest in human micromotion, which may have a societal impact in the long run.
Open Research
MICRO has been an Open Research flagship project. This includes making the entire project as open as possible, but as closed as necessary. The project shares publications, data, source code, application, and other parts of the research process openly.