"Music, Gesture, and Musical Grammar"
There has been a fairly long tradition of correlating physical gestures--the sort of movements we make as either a supplement or an accompaniment to speaking--with music. Over the last ten years or so a number of researchers, building on recent advances in technologies for capturing motion and on theoretical perspectives that place a greater emphasis on the role of the body in human cognitive processes, have shown that there are indeed a number of ways music and gesture connect with one another. In this paper I would like to explore what relationships between music and gesture might tell us about some of the basic features of musical organization, taking the view that work on gesture can make a significant contribution to our understanding of musical grammar.