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Deviations in Quiet Breathing during Music Listening

Posted on by finnupham

(This is post is derived from a poster presentation at the 14th International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition, hosted in San Francisco, CA, USA, July 4th-9th, 2016)

Music listeners often fall into quiet breathing and yet music has been shown to influence when individual listeners inhale. Here is an explanation of how deviations in quiet breathing can be measured in the respiratory sequence, and tests of how these deviations can depend on the musical work.

Defining Quiet Breath

When we are at rest and not preparing to act or thinking about acting, our bodies generally fall into the state of quiet breathing:

  • Moderate depth
  • Short inspiralation, ~1 s
  • Short elastic expiration ~ 2.2 s
  • Stable periodic cycle

Quiet breathing is efficient and discrete, a respiratory sequence that does not require attention or conscious control. Compared breathing behaviour during physical actions, the regularity of quiet breathing suggests that it should be relatively easy to model.

Continue reading “Deviations in Quiet Breathing during Music Listening” →

Breathing in Music: Measuring and Marking Time

Posted on by finnupham

(This is post is derived from a poster presentation at the Making Time in Music conference, hosted by the Faculty of Music of Oxford University, Sept 14-16th, 2016)

Abstract

Our breath marks time for the entirety of our lives. Whether a period of 2 seconds or 20, we know roughly how it will continue or be adjusted to new demands, and this need for fresh air imposes an inescapable rhythm just beyond what is readily heard as metrical. We use breath to communicate with speech and affective displays, but we also monitor each others’ breathing and use this information to coordinate interactions: breathing in anti-phase when in dialogue, or together when synchronising actions. Obviously, musical activities such as singing and playing wind instruments involve exhalations and the particular physical constraints of our respiratory system. Other components of breath are used to prepare and set the timing of actions. For example, the inhalation at the beginning of a piece defines tempo and intensity for many solo performers and small ensembles, and some types of musicians are extremely practiced at picking up all that is needed to play in synch from one careful gasp. We might consider breath to be auxiliary to the actions of music making, just a means to the sound, but this biological system may be play a fundamental role in our understanding of music and musical time. There is growing evidence that listening to music can engage our respiratory system, drawing us into a specific physical division of time. This coordination is not so strict as breathing with the heard performers, but rather a subtle alignment of phase at specific moments in a particular piece. For this to occur, even intermittently, our respiratory system must be engaged in the work of understanding what we hear. Voluntarily or unconsciously, breathing informs synchrony on the scale of milliseconds, seconds, and minutes, and this phasic and adaptive system promises to be powerful in defining musical time both physically and metaphorically.

Continue reading “Breathing in Music: Measuring and Marking Time” →

Activity Analysis toolbox

Posted on by finnupham

Activity Analysis is descriptive and statistical method for interpreting the temporal coordination of measured events across synchronously recorded time series, developed to investigate collections of continuous responses to music like ratings of tension.

I’ve been developing Activity Analysis since 2007, when I was presented a bunch of continuous felt emotional intensity ratings from audience members attending a concert of orchestral Mozart music and asked to do what I could with them. Looking at the music cognition literature, I wasn’t all that pleased with the analytic options already in practice. Some were numerical dubious, others more statistically justified but none did a very good job of telling me WHEN interesting or important stuff was happening in the responses. There are lots of questions one can put to time series data, some of them good, many of them less useful, and my master’s thesis and the continuous response analysis wiki came out of a long process to understand what kinds of questions we have and could ask of temporal traces of experience.

The advantage of continuous responses for music is that time makes a nice firm causal anchor on what the listener knows and can respond to. While someone can have expectations (and memories) reaching into the future, and thoughts and feelings tying to the notes that have passed, the chronology of presentation  and the present are essential to the reception of music (and many other parts of the conscious experience). We have been recording continuous traces of listener experience for decades but the temporal power of these data has mostly lain dormant. Continue reading “Activity Analysis toolbox” →

New Blog just for Solo Response Project

Posted on by finnupham

I’m about to do a lot more writing on the Solo Response Project, and all of it will be on a new blog: http://soloresponseproject.com/

I’ll be writing about the responses to each stimulus, methodological decisions around the analysis, linking to data and code repositories for anyone keen on playing with these numbers and methods, and maybe even get some special guests to post on responses collected. 

So if you are keen, pick up the rss feed, bookmark the blog, or follow me on twitter, where I’ll point to interesting posts from time to time.

Open Science (a course?)

Posted on by finnupham

Despite having to miss a week for conferencing, I signed up for the Peer 2 Peer university Open Science Course running through August, and I’m just catching up today. This means watching last weeks discussion,  complete some tasks and write some blog posts, here. So shortly, there will be more relevant content on open science, particularly open science from a fringe discipline.