A Grammar of Expressive Conducting Gestures

In recent years, research on sonification has paid more attention to sound variations induced by expressive gestures. This chapter focuses on conducting gestures, emphasizing expressive gestures performed by the non-dominant hand. It is assumed that these gestures implicitly correspond to musical nuances partially encoded in the scores and convey a meaning based on a grammatical structure specific to gestural languages. We, therefore, propose to analyze these gestures in light of linguistic mechanisms that govern signed languages. In particular, we are interested in the processes of sign formation from the combination of elementary components and the inflection processes that apply to these components to efficiently generate rich and expressive sentences. Based on this grammatical theory underlying sign language and a sound-tracking methodology, we create and evaluate a new dataset of expressive conducting gestures.