Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC), National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Via Gian Domenico Romagnosi, 18, Rome, 00196, Italy.
Unit of Measurements and Biomedical Instrumentation, Dept. of Engineering, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma (UCBM), Rome, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2024 Sep 27;14(1):22267. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-73593-4.
Playing music is a complex task that relies on the combination of musicians' technical and expressive skills. While the literature has investigated the effects of musical expressivity on the listeners, the way how technical difficulty and emotional expressivity affect musicians during playing has surprisingly received no attention. In an attempt to fill this gap in the literature, we collected behavioral and physiological data from twelve violinists playing 29 pieces that included both technical exercises and excerpts from classical repertoire for violin. After playing each stimulus, participants rated it for emotional expressivity and technical difficulty. During the entire session, cardiac parameters and electrodermal activity were collected, together with the kinematic parameters of the bowing gesture. A set of Linear Mixed-Effect (LME) models suggested that emotional expressivity attributed to music affected the fluidity of bowing (i.e., smoothness), with the excerpts rated as more expressive being performed in a less smooth way. In contrast, LME models revealed no effects of expressivity and technical difficulty on any of the physiological parameters of violinists. Our results offer novel insights into the psychophysiological dynamics that link motor parameters with musical expressivity. These findings could influence educational practices in music and deepen our understanding of aesthetic emotions.
演奏音乐是一项复杂的任务，依赖于音乐家技术和表现力的结合。虽然文献已经研究了音乐表现力对听众的影响，但技术难度和情感表现力如何影响演奏者的方式却出人意料地没有得到关注。为了填补这一文献空白，我们从 12 位小提琴家那里收集了行为和生理数据，他们演奏了 29 首乐曲，包括技术练习曲和经典小提琴曲的片段。在演奏每一个刺激物后，参与者对其情感表现力和技术难度进行了评分。在整个过程中，收集了心脏参数和皮肤电活动，以及弓的运动学参数。一组线性混合效应（LME）模型表明，音乐赋予的情感表现力影响了弓的流畅性（即平滑度），被评为更具表现力的片段表现得不太流畅。相比之下，LME 模型没有揭示表现力和技术难度对小提琴家任何生理参数的影响。我们的研究结果为将运动参数与音乐表现力联系起来的心理生理动态提供了新的见解。这些发现可能会影响音乐教育实践，并加深我们对审美情感的理解。
