Expressive Intention and Perception of Body Language in Popular Music Performance: Interpretation of the visual communication between the vocal performer and the audience

This thesis explores the communication chain between the performer and audience in the physical vocal performance, and more precisely how the performer´s body language (movements, gestures and posture) is subjectively and intersubjectively perceived by the audience. This is done by analyzing 24 participants´ comments about what they believe the performer to communicate, in two videos with different emotive intention (anger and sadness). The participants were free to express themselves about every aspect of both the audible and visual performance, as in a normal performance setting, which led to a large variety of findings. This thesis will present results both from the theory applied, and from the experiment, which concerns how we perceive the performer´s body language, and how we can interpret it from a scientific perspective. First and foremost, this thesis wishes to shed light on the lack of information about expression and perception of the physical vocal performance, as the field (of music and gestures) has been concerned with experiments with instrumentalists, not vocalist. One of the findings is that the research of expressiveness in music performance needs to establish a terminology for analyzing the body language of vocalists. It also seems that illustrating and emblematic gestures, which substantiate the lyrics and mood intended, are the most effective conveyers of emotional intention. This was found especially when the gestures and movements derived from the performer´s natural gesture repertoire, understood in this thesis as emotional leakage