After a quick search for biomechanics and music, I came across the neurologist Frank Wilson, who is known for his work involving the human hand as it relates specifically to musicianship. His 1998 book “The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture” seems to have been well received, and if I have time I would very much like to read it early on this semester. My interests stem from music and dexterity, and being a guitarist of about fifteen years now, I find it fascinating how my hands can perform such complicated actions with minimal effort on my part. This, of course, has risen up out of many hours of practice, but nevertheless is amazing.
Frank Wilson describes his initial interest in hands and music as being sparked by watching his daughter, then twelve years old, practicing for her piano recital. He writes that he immediately began wondering how her fingers could move so quickly, and more relavent to his field, how the brain is able to control so many complex movements with such accuracy. In an article published in ‘Seminars in Neurology: Volume 9, No. 2’ (June 1989), title “Acquisition and Loss of Skilled Movement in Musicians,” Wilson described the movement of athletes and musicians to be quite similar, given the complexity and accuracy required.
Wilson wrote that a musician’s movements are categorized as ballistic movements, being that the muscles involved are fired at the onset of movement, but stop working long before the motion has completed. Like the explosion that cause a bullet to fire, ballistic movements are fast and powerful, and he argues very accurate. While usually a movement’s qualities of speed and accuracy are said to be inversely related (speed goes up and accuracy goes down), these ballistic movements are the opposite. When speed increases, accuracy is not lowered. I can attest that this is true of my own guitar playing, where my accuracy can often times be increased by playing faster.
Under the same line of thought, Wilson also wrote in this article how musicianship and athleticism are similar on the micro level, in that they both primarily involve movements towards an external entity. That is, motion and action are for the purpose of interacting with something external to the individual’s body, whether it be a piano key, soccer ball, or even the solid ground to run on. Both sports and musical performance are then the “problem of moving the body accurately at high speed to make contact with a target… whose distribution in space and time is predictable” (pg 147). This may seem to be an obvious point, but it’s something that I’ve come to realize in designing interactive pieces and instruments of my own. Using motion capture, in any form, seems to me to be a terrible interaction if not used in conjunction with some type of external object. When discussing the most beautiful forms of biomechanics, these movements are usually a reaction to some object, or another person, leaving me to think that that other entity is just as important as the body and it’s motions.