ABSTRACT
Musical sound has great power to make us move, or to create sensations of movement in our minds. This is obvious from ubiquitous situations of people dancing, marching, gesticulating, nodding their heads, or tapping their feet to music, or of people giving verbal accounts of imagining moving to music. Yet, we may see great variations in the movements that people actually make to any single piece of music. People may perceive some salient features of musical sound similarly: for example, people may all move in synchrony with the pulse of a dance tune, yet at the same time individually make hand movements that reveal a focus on different features in the music, such as the melodic line of the singer or of the lead guitar, or the drum patterns. Adopting the notion of affordance from ecological psychology (Gibson 1979), meaning that people, dependent on their individual background, expertise, particular situation or mood at any moment, may focus on different features in any single phenomenon of the world, I shall in this chapter present some ideas on gestural affordances of musical sound.
