Interaction, Cooperation and Entrainment in Music: Experience and Perspectives

Complex multi-agent behavioral coordination requires the capability of reading and sending subtle sensorimotor messages while performing a joint action towards a shared goal. While progress has been made in the field of social neuroscience, the neurobehavioral mechanisms underlying this kind of interaction, still represent the ‘dark matter’ of cognitive neuroscience. Here we present a series of investigations using ensemble musicians as a test-bed to explore whether motion kinematics and advanced time-series analysis could be used to extract these dynamics. The data we report suggests that the pattern of sensorimotor communication flow between musicians and conductors modulate joint action outcome. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that music ensemble communication is conveyed by movements of different body parts, each one of them containing complementary information needed for coordination. This research line has thus the potential to unravel the multi-scale and multi-channel nature of human sensorimotor communication.