Blog plans

This blog is meant to be an intermediate sharing ground on the way to writing up the backlog of research results accumulated in my last decade of research on psychophysiological measurements of musicians and observers/consumers/audience participants during musical activities.

This should be pointing to specific code repositories sharing open notebooks to process, analyses, and visualise measurements of:

Heart rate

Respiratory wave and phases

Body motion (torso mounted accelerometers or video capture)

Some of these measurements also come a long with audio recordings of the events, video recordings of performance, and score/symbolic annotations of performance actions.

Some posts will be about:

specific individual experiments, reporting all that was captured and what specific is openly shared

Methods for signal processing with links to python code

Methods for analysis with example analysis notebooks

Examples of results, including fun visualisations.

Discussions of results from other publications of concert research experiments.

Hopefully new posts will be at least weekly, I certainly have enough content to do so for years.

As a little previous of what body measurements I will be sharing, the above figure is a composite plot of measurements from one of six band members during a hip hop live show through one track. This performer both plays guitar and raps, and at 60 s his heart rate, respiration, and body motions shows a sharp change in character to reflect this change of performance action.

During (mostly) guitar playing (0-60s, 100s-120s):

this musician's breathing is fast (~25 BPM) but even with a few small deviations

Their heart rate is high and fairly flat, consistent elevated sympathetic nervous system activity during a physically and cognitively demanding task in a stressful (if familiar) situation

Body motions is pretty low, with lighter periodicity, as he stands mostly in place while playing

During (mostly) rapping (60-100s, 120-160s):

respiration shifts to vocalisation shapes, with occasional deep fast inspirations and long controlled expirations with small sips of air along the way

The heart rate during vocalisation shows dramatic dips with some of the large breaths, consistent with extreme respiration interacting with heart rate despite high sympathetic activity (so not what many mean by HRV!)

body movement is bigger, more variable (rhetorically relevant expressive gestures) and much more periodic (pacing while rapping).

A lot more can be said about how this players body is engaged in these two performance activities, how all this relates to shifts in the spotlight, how this compares to the other musicians on stage, and to what the audience was doing. And a lot more will be said, here, soon.