Musical sounds and the body are interdependently linked in music performance. The key to musical expression lies in the way the body conducts music over time. In this study, General Tau Theory (Lee, 2005) was used as a theoretical framework to explore the head movements made by a classical guitarist during two performances. The musician’s head movements were analysed in conjunction with sound intensity and temporal features of the music. Differences in expression between the performances were established by listeners ’ ratings of audio recordings. Tau-G guided head movements were not found to be related to intensity glides of individual notes, and the tau-coupling constant (k) did not vary between expressively different performances. Significant differences between the two performances in tau-guided head movement timing and musical tempo characteristics suggest that the body’s role in musical expression lies in expressive timing. However, limitations in this study prevent firm conclusions being drawn from these results. Ways of eliminating these defects are discussed and future directions for the application of Tau Theory to body movement in music are identified. "The material of music is sound and bodily movement" – Aristides Quintilianus 1 “Every musical manifestation should rest on a joint physical and intellectual basis, demonstrating the inseparability of body from soul.”

Abstract – This paper presents the design of representing the performance profile with hierarchical pulse sets (i.e., hierarchical duration vs. amplitude matrices), and then applying Genetic Algorithm (GA) to evolve the hierarchical pulse sets for music interpretation, where the fitness of GA is derived from the structure of the music to be performed. In previous work [19], we have shown that GA can evolve suitable pulse sets for musical performance. Also, commonality and diversity are found among the performance profiles decided by those evolved pulse sets. This paper reports the experiment results from an improved system where a new version of fitness rules has been devised. On basis of this system, we are proposing the next steps for the research, that is, to build a dynamic model that evolves expressive music performance through agent performers ’ interactions. Index Terms – Genetic Algorithm, expressive music performance, pulse set, musical structure

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