Space, Time and Expression in Orchestral Conducting

The art of conducting involves a formal set of gestures, designed to convey musical meaning through movement. Interestingly, this relatively simple collection of gestures enables the conductor to communicate highly complex musical messages to the ensemble, indicating a non-trivial interaction between movement kinematics and sound. The following book chapter discusses this phenomenon. We first introduce movement-to-sound cross-modal mapping, surveying behavioral and neurophysiological research suggesting how spatio-kinetic features may be “translated” into aspects of musical rhythm, loudness and pitch. This is followed by a detailed discussion of the kinematics of right-hand gestures in conducting and their musical meanings. The kinematic correlates of expressive conducting are discussed by introducing some of the basic principles governing human movement generation. These principles include the wish to maximize motion smoothness, captured by the “minimum jerk” model, and the isochrony principle governing motor timing. Notwithstanding the considerable work that has already been invested in analyzing music conducting, many of the secrets underlying musical conducting still remain to be unraveled. This can only be achieved through a multidisciplinary approach, involving a variety of research disciplines, such as social psychology, computational motor control, musicology, mechanics, acoustics, as well as cross-modal sound-to-movement mapping.