ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the complexity-reduction techniques often applied in modeling music interaction. It looks at the ramifications of reducing complexity and exploiting similarity for a tool like functional data analysis (FDA). The chapter illustrates FDA by means of results obtained from an experiment where the authors analyzed music-evoked body movement of 35 subjects. This proves the validity of this technique, although it is of course not the only convenient tool for studying musical embodiment. The chapter discusses some methods for handling complexity. Analyzing music separately from body movement was a simple means of handling complexity. Features measured during music-evoked body movement are represented as functions of time. The chapter also looks at a number of similarity measures commonly used for studying musical embodiment. A popular method for expressing similarity between variables is correlation, which is usually expressed by the Pearson product moment correlation coefficient.
