Embodied Musicality in Guitar Playing: Body Movements and Flow Experience During Collaborative Musical Improvisation

Phan, Kevin Minh, KM (2023) Embodied Musicality in Guitar Playing: Body Movements and Flow Experience During Collaborative Musical Improvisation. Master thesis, Psychology.

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Abstract

In the peak performance perspective of music making, instrumental musicians who experience flow while making music, seem to be in an optimal condition of focus and fluency. Furthermore, recent developments in music education explore the role of the body and the instrument-body relationship as part of an embodied musical experience, suggesting the potential of actively implementing body movements as prospective methods in instrumental music teaching. The purpose of this explorative pilot study is, therefore, to inspect the association between body movements and flow experience in a collaborative musical improvisation setting by incorporating body movement exercises in music lessons. To examine this, we conducted an innovative longitudinal experiment with three musicians who participated in four ‘Kine-Musical Performance’ (KiMuPe) sessions with guitars and concluded each session with a musical improvisation task. No hypotheses were formulated for this pilot study. The improvisation segments were recorded, then we extracted and analyzed the amount of body movement of each participant via OpenPose. For measuring flow experience, we used questionnaire items of the Flow Short Scale (FSS; Engeser & Rheinberg, 2008; Rheinberg et al., 2003). The findings show a significant relation between the average amount of body movements and flow experience when incorporating both flow factors of the FSS into a full model (i.e., ‘Absorption by Activity’ and ‘Fluency of Performance’). The results point toward further insight into flow research in music and people’s engagement with music on an embodied level. Directions for future research to investigate flow experience in collaborative music performance settings are discussed. Keywords: music, embodied musicality, body movements, flow experience, collaboration in music, improvisation, music education

Item Type:	Thesis (Master)
Supervisor name:	Jonge-Hoekstra, L. de and Hartigh, J.R. den
Degree programme:	Psychology
Differentiation route:	Talent Development and Creativity (TDC) [Master Psychology]
Date Deposited:	23 Aug 2023 09:15
Last Modified:	23 Aug 2023 09:15
URI:	http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/2780

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