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138 Appendix C A Note on Methods video analysis Although video data may seem to be a simple, transparent, objective record of physical facts, the translation of live performance into video—at any resolution or frame rate—is always a partial depiction, highlighting some things and obscuring others. Video does not capture the moment-tomoment state of every inch of the body; instead it records the light impinging on a digital retina from a single point of view. For example, my archive contains approximately one hundred hours of lessons, concerts, and interviews ; nearly all of this material depicts the front of singers’ bodies. Doing so focuses attention on the movement of the hands and face rather than the line of the back or the back of the neck. Furthermore, only the very surfaces of the body are visible. The complex muscular action underlying vocalization and gesture remains concealed beneath the sheath of skin. Video is a wonderful tool, but it is always incomplete. Some studies of the moving body attempt to overcome these limitations by measuring the precise positions of particular joints (cf. van Noorden 2010), and this works very well for studies that are primarily concerned with the objective position of body in three-dimensional space. My analyses , however, deal in general with movement relative to the rest of the body, rather than movement in absolute space. One reason for this is that the technical requirements of measuring absolute space—affixing transmitters to a singer’s joints and setting up at least three sensors—would have been an awkward intrusion, both socially and kinesthetically. Although I have not seen cases of singers altering their gestures in the face of complicated camera equipment (to do so, even with deliberate intention, is very difficult), I had hoped to make singers feel more comfortable by using simple , nonintrusive means of recording performances—my handheld camera was far less conspicuous than the elaborate video and audio recording equip- Note on Methods / 139 ment found at most public concerts. More importantly, as chapters 3 and 5 will explain, the spaces at issue in gesture typically have to do with the body’s own spatial layout, based on relationships between its parts. The space of this phenomenal body (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 221) is the central concerns of these analyses, not absolute position in a body-independent coordinate system. The human visual system processes more than just sight: it is oriented toward action, for detecting that a virtual object is being stretched, that a singer is reaching for something, or that a singer has come to some degree of rest between gestures. Though the human eye may not be able to precisely measure position, velocity, and acceleration in standard units, it does an excellent job of identifying and interpreting what the body is doing. An array of numerical data generated from gesture sensors shows none of this without a human interpreter. As my analyses and interviews are aimed at understanding the virtual world inhabited and acted upon by musicking bodies, rather than the objective world of Euclidean threedimensional space, the ensemble of video recordings and human visual processing is the appropriate tool for the job. I also had to choose my shots. Some of this video, especially from lessons , includes both teachers and students in the frame, in order to examine the real-time dynamics of gestural transmission. The majority of the camera work, however, frames a single body. In contrast with conventional concert filming techniques, this shot excludes the accompanying musicians (harmoniumists , violinists, sarangiyas, tabliyas, tanpura players, supporting vocalists). For the purposes of gestural analysis, I treat the singer’s performance as independent of these musicians—indeed, it is a matter of wide agreement that the singer gives musical cues to these musicians, but only rarely takes cues from them (Napier 2007). My analytic focus on the individual musicking body as a site for the transmission of music is accomodated by these camera angles. interviews I used two methods for structuring interviews. The first was asking singers questions about their musical heritage and their experience of performance, positioning myself both as a researcher and as a student of music. Thus, the responses I received shifted fluidly between reports of musical experience (offered by a practitioner to a researcher) and personal advice to me (offered by a musical elder to a student). This method evoked a good deal of quasi-hagiographic folklore about legendary musicians and beloved gurus and, indeed, put me in the...

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