Communication in Orchestra Playing as Measured with Granger Causality

Coordinated action between music orchestra performance, driven by a conductor, is a remarkable instance of interaction/communication. However, a rigorous testing of inter-individual coordination in an ecological scenario poses a series of technical problems. Here we recorded violinists’ and conductor’s movements kinematics in an ecological interactive scenario. We searched for directed influences between conductor and musicians and among musicians by using the Granger Causality method. Our results quantitatively show the dynamic pattern of communication among conductors and musicians. Interestingly, we found evidence that the aesthetic appreciation of music orchestras’ performance is based on the concurrent increase of conductor-to-musicians causal influence and reduction of musician-to-musician information flow.