'Sensing' Musical Expressions

Teresa Marrin Nakra, assistant professor of music, joined the College’s faculty for the 2005–2006 academic year, bringing with her an expertise in musical technology. A project in musical expression, which she has worked on throughout her previous teaching stays at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and the Massachusetts College of Art, is now being researched at the College.

With a Ph.D. from MIT’s acclaimed Media Laboratory, Teresa has been bringing a high-tech interaction paradigm to classical and traditional music. Through the help of scientific equipment more commonly found in the medical field than in the arts, she's discovered that conductors express their emotions through their gestures as they lead musicians through a performance. Taking it one step further, the goal of her most recent experiment was to discover if and how the emotions expressed by the conductor were "felt" by the orchestra members, and even more so, the audience.

"I think a lot of people wonder what the conductor accomplishes standing up there," she said in a recent Boston Globe article.

On April 8, dozens of musicians and audience members participated in her unique and novel research experiment targeting emotional response. Organized in collaboration with McGill University in Montreal, Teresa and her interdisciplinary team of scientists designed a large-scale project to measure, in real time, the physiological and emotional responses of six members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (including famed conductor Keith Lockhart) and 50 audience members. Sensors to measure heart rate, skin conductivity, movement, and muscle activity were worn by orchestra members and selected audience members, while others in attendance charted their emotional responses to the music on a slider box.

The same performance was videotaped, and will later be shown to an audience wired with the same sensors, in an effort to learn if experiencing a live performance is at all similar to watching it on DVD in the comforts of home.

Leading up to the April 8 concert in Boston, Teresa fitted TCNJ orchestra conductor and professor Philip Tate and several members of the College orchestra with the same sensors during a series of pilot studies. She tested more than $80,000 worth of scientific equipment, much of which was donated or loaned to the cause.

Teresa will spend her summer analyzing the enormous amounts of data gathered during the project, and hopes to publish her findings.