Social co-regulation and communication in North Indian duo performances

Musical interaction and daily social interaction are deeply intertwined; indeed, music is a form of social interaction. Communication in both everyday and musical interaction comes about through the socially-oriented behaviour of the participants, who manage and regulate their immediate experience according to their purposes and their expectations of others. Such interpersonal exchanges present a micro-social context of human interaction (Bavelas 2007), in which both musical and everyday interactions share access to all the communicative modalities of the body: verbal and nonverbal, symbolic and pragmatic. This chapter argues that much could be learnt about the process of musical communication by observing the interpersonal behaviour of performing musicians; furthermore, that the results of such pragmatic investigations of musical communication can offer insights to our understanding of everyday human interaction. This chapter presents the results of original empirical research on the spontaneous, nonverbal behaviour of North Indian duo musicians in performance. The report of this study and its findings includes an analysis of video data that reveals how various practical and social circumstances affect the musicians’ interaction. Implications for the study both of live music performance and of everyday interaction arise from these findings, and the chapter concludes with some thoughts on the potential value of pragmatic, movement-focused music research to other disciplines.