The Lexicon of the Conductor’s Face

In the last decade, the multimodal aspects of communication have become an emerging field of research. Much work has been done on single systems of communication different from the verbal one gestures, facial expression, gaze, body movements (see for example Kendon, 1993; Ekman and Friesen, 1978; Argyle and Cook, 1976; Birdwhistell, 1970) and on the relationship among acoustic and visual modalities (Rimé and Schiaratura, 1991; Mc Neill, 1992). These studies provide information about how different modalities interact in accomplishing a common communicative task. An interesting topic in this field is how communication in one modality can provide information as to what is to be done in another modality. A case of this is the orchestra Conductor's communication (Rudolf, 1993). A Conductor has to communicate to players information about rhythm, timbre, loudness, expression in their playing, and does by gesture, facial expression, gaze, body movement: here the visual modalities are used to provide information on how to perform in the acoustic modality. The Conductor's communicative behavior has mainly been studied on its gestural side. Boyes Braem and Braem (1999) provided a very interesting analysis of the Conductor's handshapes and their meanings. In this work I will analyze the communicative functions of the Conductor's gaze, head movements and facial expression, trying to show that these expressive signals are not at all idiosyncratic but very consistent and systematic, to the extent that it is possible to write down a lexicon of them, a list of expressive items where each gaze or facial signal corresponds to a precise meaning. To build such a lexicon two different approaches can be taken: if you adopt a bottom-up approach, you can record and analyze observational data, while trying to see whether, for instance, the same gaze or head signal always has the same meaning. With a top-down approach, on the other side, you wonder what are in principle the types of information that a Conductor may need to communicate to players in his conducting, and for each of them you figure out, on the basis of your communicative competence, and/or find out in observational data, what gaze, head and face signals the Conductor does or might perform to communicate that meaning. In this paper I start from both points of view: in Section 2. I try to figure out what are the meanings a Conductor may have to communicate, and what gaze, face and head signals are generally devoted to communicate them. In Sections 3. and 4. I present a procedure for the transcription and analysis of multimodal communication that is called "the musical score" of the vocal, gestural, facial, bodily communication; I adapt it (Sect. 5.) to the analysis of some fragments of Conductors' communicative behavior, to test whether the signals hypothesized in the first part are in fact used in real conducting; finally (Sect. 6) I outline a lexicon of the Conductor’s face. I conclude (Sect.7) by discussing some general problems in the theory of communication regarding the mechanisms of polysemy and diachronic evolution of signals.