Experience and Meaning in Music Performance

The aim of the major research project Experience and meaning in music performance was to investigate how musical performance is experienced by musicians and listeners, and how this experience relates to the meaning people ascribe to it. The core of the project focused on north Indian raga performance, with other strands concentrating on jazz, rock, Cuban popular music and Afro-Brazilian Congado. This interdisciplinary project was pursued by a team of researchers working in close collaboration, employing a combination of ethnographic and empirical methods. It involved the recording of professional quality video and audio recording and the development of new methods for their analysis. The project was funded between 2005 and 2009.

Amongst the ultimate outputs of the project was a collaborative volume: 

• Professor Martin Clayton, Byron Dueck & Laura Leante (2013). Experience and Meaning in Music Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The following PhD dissertations are also linked the project:

• Nikki Moran, Measuring musical interaction: Analysing communication in embodied musical behaviour (2007)
• Mark Doffman, Feeling the groove: Shared time and its meanings for three jazz trios (2008)
• Andrew McGuiness, Mental and motor representation for music performance (2010)
• Adrian Poole, Groove in Cuban dance music: An analysis of son and salsa (2012)

This is an archived version of the project web site. It also includes information related to the international network, Entrainment in Music Research and a set of pages relating to entrainment in the Afro-Brazilian Congado.

Experience and meaning in music performance was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.