The body and sung melodies I - Computational Analysis of Melodic Contour and Body Movement¶

Tejaswinee Kelkar¶

In this talk I will focus on work done during my PhD thesis. In my work I have tried to understand the role of embodiment in melodic contour perception of sung melodies. In other words, i study how we move our bodies in response to music. Melodies play an important role in both speech and music. In this talk, I explore various dimensions of melodic contour: verticality, motion metaphors, body use, and multi-feature correlational analysis. My work brings together the multimodal mappings of pitched sound, gestural imagery evoked by these sounds, and defining geometries of these contours. I will discuss experiments related to sound tracing or the act of drawing sounds in the air, and how to work with multimodal data in this domain. Finally, I will discuss how metaphors for sound, and sound shapes govern our perception of melodic and musical material.