Sound-Action Chunks in Music

One core issue in music production and perception is the relationship between sound features and action features. From various recent research, it seems reasonable to claim that most people, regardless of levels of musical expertise, have fairly good knowledge of the relationship between sound and sound production, as e.g. manifest in various cases of ’air instrument’ performance and other spontaneous body movements to musical sound. The challenge now is to explore these sound-action links further, in particular at the micro-levels of musical sound such as in timbre and texture, and at the meso-levels of various rhythmical and contoural features. As suggested by the seminal work of Pierre Schaeffer and co-workers on so-called

sonic objects

several decades ago, perceptually salient features can be found on the chunk-level in music, meaning in fragments of sound-action in the approximately 0.5 to 5 seconds range. In this chapter, research on the emergence of sound-action chunks and their features will be presented together with some ideas for practical applications.