Abstract
In this keynote I give an overview of studies realized at IPEM in the domain of music and body rhythms. In particular, I address the question how music can entrain body rhythms, such as in dancing and conducting but above all in walking and running. This overview is organized along three challenges. The first challenge is concerned with the question how body rhythms can be captured, especially when body rhythms are studied outside the laboratory. This is illustrated with some video excerpts that ultimately resulted in a music-body rhythm entrainment tool called D-Jogger. The second challenge, parallel with the first, is concerned with the question of the mechanisms behind entrainment. Using D-Jogger, it was possible to get a deeper insight in behavioral alignment strategies for entrainment. Our newest findings reveal that human body rhythms (walking, running) can be manipulated with music in a remarkable consistent way that copes with the predictive coding theory. The third challenge is concerned with finding good applications where we can demonstrate that D-Jogger was useful for society. Meanwhile we have results with the manipulation of walking in Parkinson disease patients and in patients with multiple sclerosis. We currently co-conduct a large intervention study in the domain of sports where D-Jogger is used in combination with new sonification strategies involving reinforcement learning based on punishment and reward. Taken together, the work at IPEM might have contributed to some new ideas in the domain of kinematic music-based bio-feedback systems - a principle which we are currently extending towards a more multimodal perspective.
Bio
Marc Leman is Methusalem research professor in Systematic Musicology, director of IPEM, Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music, Dept. Musicology, and head of the department of Art History, Musicology, and Theatre Studies at Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium. He is the founder of the ASIL (Arts and Science Interaction Lab) at the KROOK (inaugurated in 2017). His research is about embodied music cognition, music interaction, and associated epistemological and methodological issues. He has > 400 publications, among which several monographies (e.g. “Embodied music cognition and mediation technology”, MIT Press, 2007; “The expressive moment”, MIT Press, 2016) and co-edited works (e.g. “Musical gestures: sound, movement, and meaning”, Routledge, 2010; "The Routledge companion to embodied music interaction", 2017). He teaches courses in Music Psychology (BAIII) and Music Interaction and Technology (MA) at UGent.