Quartet Body Motion and Pupillometry Dataset

This dataset contains performance data that were collected during an experiment with a string quartet, and listening data that were collected during a follow-up experiment, using recordings from the performance experiment. The design of the experiments and the nature of the data that were collected are explained below. 

More information about the design of the experiments and the data collection can be found in the following publications:

Bishop, L. and Jensenius, A. R. (2020). Reliability of two IR motion capture systems in a music performance setting. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Sound and Music Computing. Torino, Italy.

Bishop, L., Jensenius, A. R., and Laeng, B. (2021). Musical and bodily predictors of mental effort in string quartet music: An ecological pupillometry study of performers and listeners. Frontiers in Cognition.

Bishop, L., González Sánchez, V., Laeng, B., Jensenius, A. R., and Høffding, S. (submitted). Move like everyone is watching: Social context affects head motion and gaze in string quartet performance. Journal of New Music Research. 

Performance data

Performance data were collected in December 2019 as part of an experiment on how communicative body motion is affected by the presence of an audience and manipulations of visual contact between musicians. The experiment also investigated how musicians' mental effort is affected by different kinds of performance demands. 

A string quartet comprising advanced music students played pieces from their repertoire in rehearsal and concert conditions. The pieces were: String Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 76, No. 4, 1st and 2nd movements, by Haydn; String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10, 1st and 2nd movements, by Debussy. All performances were carried out in the motion capture lab at the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion, at the University of Oslo. 

Rehearsal conditions: the quartet played the first 68 bars of the 1st movement of the String Quartet by Haydn. They played this excerpt five times, under the following conditions:

Blind: the musicians sat back-to-back so that they could not see each other

Score-directed: the musicians sat facing each other in their normal configuration, but were instructed to look only at the score and not at each other

Normal-rehearsal: the musicians sat facing each other in their normal configuration and were free to look at each other 

Violin-isolated: the first violinist was hidden behind a curtain, while the others sat in their normal configuration and were free to look at each other 

Repetition-rehearsal: replication of the Normal-rehearsal condition

Concert condition: the quartet played the full 1st and 2nd movements of the Haydn and Debussy String Quartets for a live audience of about 40 people, which included an examiner (the concert also constituted the quartet's semester exam). 

The data that were collected from the musicians include the following:

Motion capture data, collected using a Qualisys system with 12 Oqus 300/310 cameras and an OptiTrack system with 8 Flex 13 cameras. Both systems recorded at 120 Hz. Six reflective markers were placed on each musician: head, upper back, left and right arm above and below the elbow. Four reflective markers were also placed on each musician's eye tracking glasses. 

Eye tracking data, collected using SMI Wireless Eye Tracking Glasses, which recorded gaze position and pupil diameter at 60 Hz. 

Performers' difficulty ratings. Performers individually rated each bar of the music for technical difficulty (1--7 scale), expressivity difficulty (1--7 scale), and harmonic complexity (1--7 scale). These ratings were done in the weeks after the concert.

Listening data

Listening data were collected during the autumn of 2020 as part of an experiment evaluating how different performance demands affect mental effort in listeners. The participants in the experiment were 16 trained musicians. They listened to the four movements that were recorded during the concert condition of the performance experiment, while pupil data were recorded with a stationary eye tracker (SMI iView RED) at 60 Hz. While listening, they kept their eyes focused on a computer screen that featured a while background with a black outline of a circle. 

Scripts 

Analysis scripts are located here: https://github.com/laurabishop/Borealis