Sensorimotor Synchronization in Blind Musicians: Does Lack of Vision Influencenon-verbal Musical Communication?

Musical communication can be considered as a form of social interaction and it requires a certain degree of inter-individual cortical synchronization. Scientific literature has shown that visual experience is necessary for social interaction and visual impairment negatively influences nonverbal communication both in children and adults. In this study, we present a pilot multimodal dataset to investigate the role that visual experience plays in the context of musical interaction. We selected a mixed interaction scenario (i.e., sighted and blind performers) to investigate non-verbal communication patterns. In particular, we recorded motion tracking data to analyze the interaction between two musicians in three different contexts with the same cellist as soloist accompanied by a (1) blind pianist, (2) sighted pianist, and (3) sighted but blindfolded pianist. Recordings comprised upper-body motion capture and audio data. We also investigated human perception of changes in non-verbal behaviors, by means of an online annotation questionnaire. Preliminary results are presented.