The Department of Cognitive Science
cordially invites you
to the public defense of the PhD thesis
Joint Music-Making and Temporal Coordination in Joint Action
by
Thomas Wolf
PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Gunther Knoblich
SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: Natalie Sebanz
Members of the Dissertation Committee:
Erno Teglas, Chair, CEU
Stephen
Butterfill<http://www.butterfill.com/>m/>, external examiner, Warwick, and
Peter
Keller<https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/marcs/our_team/researchers/professor_peter_keller>,
external examiner, Western Sydney University
abstract | When humans engage in joint action, they bring about changes in the environment
together by coordinating in space and time. Even such simple joint actions as shaking
hands require sophisticated temporal coordination. This is even more obvious for complex
forms of joint action, such as joint music-making. Indeed, joint music-making is a domain
that demands an exquisite degree of precision in temporal coordination. It also poses
additional challenges, which arise from the need to predict and adapt to each other's
actions - often on different instruments and with different skill levels - while
performing extraordinarily complex patterns and adhering to context-dependent aesthetic
criteria and performance targets. In this thesis, I present three studies in which I
investigated how expert and novice musicians deal with three such challenges. The findings
illuminate the basic mechanisms underpinning humans' remarkable ability to coordinate
the timing of their actions both in musical and in non-musical joint actions. In the first
study, I investigated expert pianists' ability to adjust their temporal predictions to
the systematic, but suboptimal, timing deviations of novice pianists. In a music
coordination task, expert pianists had access to different pieces of information about
their co-performer and the co-performer's part. The results indicate that experts use
information about the novice's performance style during easier passages and
information about the novice's part (i.e. the score) during passages that are
difficult to perform. In the second study, I asked participants to adapt to an unusual
coordination pattern under various coordination conditions. The primary question was
whether the weaker coupling between limbs in interpersonal coordination (e.g., the two
hands of two different individuals) during joint performances allows for better adaptation
to difficult coordination patterns than the stronger coupling between limbs in
intrapersonal coordination (e.g., the two hands of one person). The results show that
while strong coupling between limbs facilitates precise coordination in simple
coordination patterns, this advantage disappears in more difficult patterns. The third
study focuses on a particular performance bias, namely the tendency to gradually increase
tempo during joint music-making ('rushing'). The central question was whether this
bias is specific to joint performance, or whether it also occurs during solo music-making.
The results indicate that rushing is indeed specific to joint performance. Various
hypotheses concerning the underlying mechanisms of rushing are discussed and tested. Of
these mechanisms, the findings speak in favor of a combination of human-specific period
correction mechanisms, and evolutionarily ancient synchronization mechanisms found even
among distantly related species of chorusing insects. In this thesis, I treat the domain
of joint music-making as a microcosm in which to study humans' remarkable ability to
precisely coordinate their actions in time. The three studies focus on some of the
challenges that humans face when trying to coordinate their actions in time during joint
music-making, but the findings also have broader significance: they provide us with new
insights into the general mechanisms of temporal coordination in humans, and offer new
starting points and constraints for research on joint action.
The defense will take place at Oktober 6 street 7, Oktober Hall, on Thursday, May 30, 10
am
organized by the Department of Cognitive Science
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