In musical performance, vocalists tend to gesture while they sing. But in what ways do these gestures resemble the performer’s vocalizations? This project investigates gestural iconicity in beatboxing, where performers combine vocal sounds with expressive hand, head, and wider body movements. The research seeks to understand the extent to which gestures resemble the sounds themselves, or the vocal movements used to produce them. The findings will deepen our understanding of gesture-vocalization relations in music and human communication more broadly.
Project Members
Lara Pearson
Principal Investigator
University OF Cologne , Germany
Project Description
Across a broad range of music traditions worldwide, vocalists tend to gesture with hand, head and upper body movement as they sing. Gesture plays an important role in both language and music. It can combine with vocalization and musical sound to create meaning, and thus contributes to communication. In musical contexts, co-singing gestures may express affect relating to lyrics and musical mood, but in addition gestures may reference other features such as rhythm, melodic movement, articulation, timbre and phrasing. Such referencing involves semiotic modes that also play important roles in co-speech gesturing, including iconicity. Although it is clear that co-singing gestures often have an iconic dimension, it can be less clear what precisely the gestures are iconic of. For example, a forceful downward “punch” gesture that co-occurs with a loud emphasized vocal sound may be iconic of a) the emphatic sonic qualities of the vocalization, and/or b) the forceful vocal production movements required to create the emphatic sounds.
This project theorizes and empirically examines the mechanisms underlying gestural iconicity in a particular musical context, namely beatboxing. This popular and highly creative vocal performance style is well-suited to a study of gestural iconicity for two reasons. Firstly, professional performers tend to gesture as they beatbox – it has become part of the performance style. Secondly, the style has a strong focus on innovative vocal sounds and complex beats, drawing from a wide range of electronic music genres; this results in a rich array of sonic and vocal production movement features that may also be expressed through gestural iconicity.
The key aims of the project are, firstly, to gain insight into the mechanisms underlying gestural iconicity in beatboxing: what the gestures are iconic of. Secondly, the project explores two contrasting accounts of gestural iconicity: the “acoustic account”, where gestures are iconic of the vocal sounds produced, and the “vocal-production account”, where gestures are iconic of oral articulatory and other vocal-production movements. Thirdly, the project assesses the extent to which performers use the same gestures for similar sounds and vocal-production movements, and whether this is consistent across performances and over time. By looking at gestural iconicity in a musical context the project aims to expand consideration of gesture-vocalization relations beyond spoken and signed languages to the broader field of vocal communication.