The Musical Gestures Project

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This is a broadly conceived research project on music-related gestures, based on the conviction that there are intimate links between music, understood as sonic art, and gestures, understood as human bodily movement. There are many different types of music-related gestures in performance, dance and other activities, but they all attest to the primordial role of human movement in music. In fact, we believe that our images of movement are so ingrained in our images of musical sound that images of movement determine how we perceive, remember, imagine, learn, and make music.
The primary objective of the Musical Gestures project is to work towards a coherent theory of the relationship between musical sound, human gestures and musical concepts, and there are some secondary objectives linked to this:
Refine techniques for capturing, processing, and representing music-related gestural information.
Classifying music-related gestures and develop useful overviews of gesture types within different contexts and styles.
Understanding gestural coding of music by exploring the links between sonorous and gestural images in musical memory and imagery.
Demonstrate practical applications of musical gestures as tools in performance, improvisation, composition, and music education.
The Musical Gestures project is a research project of the University of Oslo, Department of Musicology, jointly funded by The Research Council of Norway and the University of Oslo. The project will be running from July 2004 until July 2007, and both senior researchers and doctoral fellows will be involved in the project.