Leader–follower relationship embodied in movements during violin ensemble performances

Abstract

Musicians have to coordinate movements interpersonally to perform in an ensemble. As such, this study explores how violinists coordinate movements to play the same melody together in terms of the leader–follower relationships revealed by players’ movements. Twelve violinists participated in the study and played a violin ensemble in pairs. We applied Granger causality analysis to the three-dimensional displacement data of players’ heads, violins, and bows to identify leader–follower relationships between players. The results revealed the following: i) the participants adopted leader–follower roles during trials; ii) as the performance proceeded, the participants swapped roles; iii) the more difficult the parts of the score, the more notable the leader–follower relationships; iv) compared with between-head and between-violin data, the movements for between-bow data were more similar in more parts of the score that demonstrated leader–follower relationships. Further examination of cases where the leader–follower relationships were identified showed that players may have employed their own strategies to achieve a stable, coordinated state. These results suggest that, when the roles of players are not fixed in violin ensembles, performance can be adjusted in multiple ways, including swapping leader–follower roles, which is in stark contrast to previous studies that reported fixed leader–follower relationship when the first violinist only led the other parts in a string quartet.