The crucial final step in the process of understanding the gestural data of the Conductor’s Jacket project has been to interpret the significance of certain features and define general frameworks within which the features have meaning. In the case of musical performance, frameworks already exist, but they are not commonly understood or agreed-upon in quantitative ways. Therefore, I’ve chosen not to rely on any previous models of musical meaning, but rather to formulate my own theories based on analyses of the conductor data. This chapter presents several theories about expression and meaning in music, and formulates some ideas about the nature of musical expression.
5.1 Interpretation of results from analysis
From the set of features demonstrated in Chapter Four, I’ve developed ten general hypothetical rules of expression. These attempt to define the significant higher-order phenomena that are reflected in the technical features of the previous chapter. The formulation of these theories reflects the underlying project of this thesis, which has been to find ways to understand and interpret the events that are meaningful in gestural and physiological data. This phase, while it did not necessarily require much time, may be the central contribution of this thesis. This chapter discusses what the features mean, what importance they have, and which ones are most useful and practical to implement. More explicitly, I hope to use this phase to identify the most significant time-varying features in the set of gestures that I’ve analyzed. The results reflect the author’s personal judgements, based on a large amount of experience both as a musician and observer of the data.
I should add that the theories that I propose below are generalizations; they don’t account for all musicians. They approximate the trends in the behavior of the conductors I studied and generalize to a whole class of musical behaviors. As such, they are not provable or disprovable, but represent my personal insight into how humans behave, and suggest ways to incorporate greater sensitivity into future systems for expressive music.