How Movement Can Help You Create, Perform, and Listen to Music Like Never Before

This article provides a framework to understand how body movement can help develop musical creativity. Music is a complex system full of information, and musical creativity involves actively exploring and adapting to this complexity. Creativity for the music maker requires the ability to quickly switch actions and adjust to new challenges. Using the body through movement and processes like synchronization, prediction, and alignment helps musicians flexibly navigate musical possibilities.

Music is an affordance-laden structure which invites a person to interact with it expressively in multiple ways. The authors identify improvisation, composition, performing, and active listening as creative practices in music. The musical environment encourages sensorimotor activities as part of these practices. Body movement can help generate imaginative ideas and explore musical meaning. As such, movement-based learning activities engage students’ perceptual-motor exploration of their musical environment.

Introducing movement into musical instruction develops an integrative process to creativity. Movement-based activities can promote individual explorations of music. They also can develop participatory collaboration in groups.

We all know that music is multisensory experience. If using physical movement in the process of learning music, the musician goes through a sensorimotor loop, where a sensory input is processed, motor commands that interact with the environment are generated, and in turn new sensory inputs are created. The goal of learning in this way is to create flexible musicians who can respond to a wide range of musical requirements.