The effect of gesture on the perception of linearity in instrumental music

Given that music performances are made up of gestures, we might ask how the movements of an individual can alter how one perceives music. To address this question, this paper examines a hypothesis concerning the gestural priming of melodic events, and the role of this priming on the perceived continuation of the melody. When primed with a linear gesture, we hypothesize that participants will be more likely to select the continuation of a melodic idea, that is to say the melody keeps moving in the same direction. Conversely, when primed with circular gestures, participants will be more likely to select musical ideas that reverse and return to the starting pitch. Our results show that there was no significant effect of gesture, but there was a significant effect of musical scale when diatonic scales were used alongside the gesture. It appears that gestural priming is not a predictor of whether participants selected a musical gesture that continued or returned. These results suggest that familiarity with a musical context is perhaps more predictive of melodic expectation than gesture