128. Music IS Kinesiology and vice-versa

Ed Eclipse 128. Music IS Kinesiology and vice-versa

Tristan Loria: This is really exciting. Thanks for having me, Brendan.

C. Brandon Chapman: Yeah. So, uh, let me, obviously we, we usually, uh, news is created because something is new. Right. We put the new in news. Uh, and, and you have a new lab, which I got to take part in. In sort of your opening ceremony of this last week. Uh, but it's called the interdisciplinary music performance and learning lab, the IMPL lab.

But, but we'll talk more about that, like what that means, but. Um, but the reason, you know, that we wanted to, um, have you on was to discuss what, what does the lab do? You know, specifically, how is music connected to kinesiology? Because obviously when I hear kinesiology, first thing that I think of is beastie boys, you know, body moving, body moving.

Uh, so like you don't normally think of music as a kinesthetic activity. Um, but obviously in this lab name, you, you do say interdisciplinary. So, uh, so yeah, well, welcome to the podcast and, and talk about the lab itself and what it is going to be doing moving forward.

Yeah. So mostly we're interested in understanding some of the like mechanisms or kind of ways of learning music.

So in our lab, we're mainly focused on is how is it that we can use. technology such as motion capture, where we can quantify movements of individual performers, and understand a little bit more about how they change as learning progresses. So one of the main ways that we do that is, of course, we use motion capture to look at individual finger movements in piano.

We can look at movements of the upper limb in percussion. We can look at, you know, slide positions, and again, upper limb movements in Instruments like trombone and things like that. We can also look at how body sway impacts, um, emotion in singing. We do a number of different things. And in the end, what we're trying to do is we're trying to get a better understanding and a bit more rigorous knowledge regarding how is it that we move to produce sound?

So let's talk about you know, body body movement and shower singing. Okay, so I sound fantastic Like most people do right? And there's some body movement.

I mean, you, you, you kick, you like rear back and you get ready to let it fly. Right. You belt it out. And, uh, I, I know what it actually sounds like, you know, but, but there is some of that body movement. What I'm curious about is, okay, you're talking about progress though. So, so you got these little markers, right?

You put them on. Uh, would this work for like guitar too, or is that a little tricky? Okay. Yeah, it's a little bit trickier, but definitely possible. Okay. So, so let's just say piano, because that's, that was the example that, that I saw last week and participated in, but in progress, would you take a bass from somebody?

And then whether they were taking lessons or, or whatever, practicing, would you then? at a specific time marker, do it again and see that kind of improvement. Uh, how does

We know a lot about how humans acquire motor skills, and we know a lot about how to quantify that change. So. Well, we'll typically do, for example, like in piano movements, participants will come into the lab and they'll participate in like basically a baseline assessment. We typically call that their pre training or their pre test, and we'll basically have them play an excerpt that we usually write for them.

So they've never seen it before. So they'll come in and they'll practice that for a few minutes. And then, okay, now we're going to turn the motion capture system on. We're going to quantify your ability to play this piece at this time. So what I mean by quantify is we'll have you. We'll measure their finger movements.

So like the velocity, the position and all those things. And then we'll also obtain audio recordings of those trials. So basically that's our pretest. That's our baseline. Then there's some sort of like training that will happen. So in the past, what we've done is we've looked at a remote versus in person instruction.

Um, so that all assesses performance. So we basically, our thought is on this. First day of training, they come in, we have their pretest, they train, and then we have their post test and we compare the kinematics. So their finger movements, the acceleration, all those things from this post test to this pretest, does something change?

That's the question. And then more importantly, like I mentioned before, um, you know, these are sound producing movements. So in order to really determine how is it that these movements may facilitate their ability to produce sound, what typically have judges or expert raters rate the audio quality. Of these performances.

So look at things like rhythmic accuracy. Um, they'll look at, um, things like dynamics, expressivity, things like that. And what are, what we typically see is that those post test performances, they tend to sound better than the pre test performances, they get better at it. And then we can look at then the kinematics and look and see, okay, well.

No practice. Um, so the kind of gold standard is that someone will come into the lab, they'll train on day one, they'll go home, they'll get some sleep. Then they come back into the lab on the next day and they'll play that same excerpt again. So we refer to that as a retention assessment. So because there's been no practice, we're looking at this basic, relatively basic.

Permanent change in their ability to produce sound. So we'll have them play and then we'll say, okay, how do those recordings sound? Again, the judges will listen to those. Do the kinematics stay the same? And then more importantly, we can also give them a novel variation of what they practice before. So we refer to that as a transfer excerpt.

So we'll typically assess performance on a single day. They'll come back the next day. We'll assess learning and transfer as well.

C. Brandon Chapman: Now, let me, let me segue. By talking about the greatest sport ever, which is baseball. Yeah, of

Tristan Loria: course, yes.

C. Brandon Chapman: A lot of people have said that advanced analytics has ruined baseball.

Like, it's not so much feel. Now, I'm thinking about, let's just take a, some sort of, uh, concert, uh, competition or whatever. Like, I have a friend who, he won this international piano, you know, 18 under, uh, thing back, back in the late 90s. It's been years now. Just an incredibly gifted pianist. And, and there are people who were listening to these things.

Tristan Loria: I think that there is because like, you know, music is such an Auditory task, there's always going to be always that kind of like subjective judges rating of it. But if we can use kinematics or like analytics to better teach individuals, then perhaps we can facilitate the learning process because, for example, You know, this, this might sound like a hot take, but, um, I would, that's what we do.

Um, one of the, my biggest inspirations for like having this lab, um, is this painting by, um, Jakob Ochterveld. And he's like this Dutch master and like the Vermeer days and like all that. And there's a painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, which is, The music lesson, right? And in this music lesson, it's, you know, someone sitting there with like their fiddle, and then there's, um, uh, an instructor there with a violin and, you know, they're cast in this beautiful Vermeer esque light and it's very authoritative.

So I'm hoping that through our research, we can develop sort of objective ways of knowing how someone is progressing so that we can apply that to make music education more effective.

C. Brandon Chapman: I think that sounds amazing. Usually I ask in any kind of research, the therefore what question, right? We've done this research.

We have it in a peer review journal that six other people have read. Like, what are we going to do to advance? Like, what is the point of this? Who will be getting this kind of data? Will it, will it simply be that musician? Will it be their instructor or mentor, uh, to help improve? Like who, who will be getting this?

And then. talk about funding, but like, uh, but yeah, what's, what's the, what's the goal in terms of, you know, who this will reach? Cause right now it's just sitting in a, uh, concrete, you know, block room in the basement of Smith gym.

We need people who don't have, of course, You know, the money to pay expensive subscriptions to journals. So our first approach is always to publish in open access. So anyone, music educators from anywhere can access it. The second is we really want to disseminate broadly via workshops. So typically what we'll do is when we complete a research project, we'll engage in sort of like a community based demonstration and also, develop methods for best practice and how those can be integrated specifically into music education.

So we often stream those on the internet as well. So we'll do them in person to, you know, capture the main. like audience here, but it's also disseminated widely over the internet. So our main approach is kind of like double pronged. Of course we need to be scientific. That's part of my job. That's part of the research and all that.

So, you know, just trying to reach out and talk to people to reach them where they are. So a lot of outreach on our part to try and make it work.

C. Brandon Chapman: I have an idea and I think it's going to get shot down, not by you. I'm sure you're going to like this, but we had the super bowl yesterday, right? And Kendrick Lamar was the headliner of this and, And anytime it doesn't matter who the headliner is, you're going to have people who say it was boring people, you know, everybody gets really riled up about music, right?

It's such a, an important part of our lives. But what, what about next year, instead of doing a performer, we instead have Tristan Lauria right there, you know, midfield. Demonstrating this with some of the best music artists. I love it.

Tristan Loria: Let's just do that I mean, I'd prefer to do it like the Stanley Cup final.

That'd be pretty cool. Happy to reach a broad audience via the Super Bowl

Tristan Loria: professor of music.

Exactly. Yeah. So, um, I originally started out, yeah, in Toronto, Canada. Um, I was born and raised, I went to, To do an undergraduate degree at, at the time it was called Ryerson University. Now it's called Toronto Metropolitan University. So I did my bachelor of arts actually in psychology. Um, so I was really interested in sort of like cognitive aspects.

It makes sense now. It's all starting to make sense. Yeah. So like kind of cognitive aspects, perception. I was really interested in like auditory processing when I was, uh, Um, or Toronto Metropolitan University. I did my undergraduate thesis with Dr. Frank Rousseau, who's, um, you know, a world leader in, um, auditory cognitive neuroscience, and he's very interested in things like when you hear a sad song and you feel sad, how is it that you're able to sort of, you know, have that impression?

And then I went on and did a master's degree in kinesiology at the University of Toronto with Dr. Luke Tremblay. And And Luke is an expert in multi sensory contributions to motor learning. So he always, I think one of the, Luke gave me a lot of really good advice, but I think the best advice he ever gave me was like, he said to me one day, he was like, Tristan, like be the audio guy.

Like you're interested in like, you're really interested in like these auditory things. At that time we were, we were really interested in like using auditory cues to facilitate movements and all this stuff. And you know, he was really like, Tristan, like sit down. Stick with that. Stick with that. And I was like, okay.

Um, they bought a motion capture system with it. And what we were interested in investigating was this exact idea, motor control and motor learning in percussion. We started out with a collaboration with Iun Wang, who's there. And we were doing a lot of stuff with like marimba performance and marimba is just like a lot of movement there.

Wooden piano. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff like that. We were looking at the, you know, upper limb changes. We were looking at mallet movements. We were doing all these different things. So I think in the end, um, you know, if I were to think back to it, it was really like, okay. Seeing this sort of initial thing in Frank's lab about how we move and how we feel music, and then getting this sort of like training and auditory and visual integration.

And then finally applying that within a postdoctoral fellowship, um, is what equipped me with the research skills to make it here to WSU. I

C. Brandon Chapman: think that's awesome in all things, whether there's research or not. Sometimes I think of my, um, I think of my middle school band instructor, right? Guy named Bruce Hanson.

Yeah, I got to feel it. You got to feel it. Yeah. So it's got to

Tristan Loria: come from within. I talked to that about like with my students as well. It's like, you know, um, if you're going to develop like a research project, like research is, it's kind of like a lonely hearts endeavor. It takes a long time. It's. It's like very difficult and it really has that motivation that drive really has to come from within.

So I think again, like I guess I should have mentioned too, like obviously like I played in bands and stuff in Toronto as a drummer myself and uh, you know, I was always very connected to music growing up. So it was kind of like this natural next extension to be able to apply my passion towards research.

C. Brandon Chapman: Now I'm just going to ask you a couple of questions that are, um, not really related but they are. So aside from you, who's the greatest drummer that you, you know, that you. uh, admire or somebody you just think, man, they just, they're good.

So like, I love like Dave Grohl style, like in Nirvana, especially just like that over the top, like just absolutely like slamming down on the drums. Um, my other favorite drummers, um, you know, I will say just for the record, just to go on record and say this, I think Ringo Starr is very like underrated. I think he gets a lot of slack.

Um, but I think he's one of the. The best drummers for like, just like, you know, laying back and like the groove and he's just kind of like always there with like, it's very simple yet complex. Excellent sort of, um, syncopation. I just really love. And then, yeah, so my other favorite drummers, I really love this guy, Adam Willard, um, who played it against me.

It plays an alkaline trio now and then Questlove. You know, seeing Questlove a few times with like the roots and everything. I have not, but I Yeah, they're really, they did, um, when Toronto hosted the Pan Am games, they, they had a little, a free concert and it was awesome. And he is really like the leader of the band.

Yeah. And I think that's what's like really good about drumming too, is that it contributes so much, but if you're not noticing it, that's one way that you know you're doing a good job. That's

C. Brandon Chapman: why I actually like the drummer for like Dave Matthews. Because I think he just does a good job, more of it like a jazz fusion style.

really enjoy that. Yeah. Um, so, so you've been in some bands. Um, did, uh, you know, did, did you ever, you ever do other like instruments? Like what, what are you proficient in at least?

Tristan Loria: Um, well, I was fortunate actually. Um, you know, this was around the time I'll be dating myself here, but, um, this has been like blink when he released enema of the state.

All right. You've just.

C. Brandon Chapman: Yeah, I

They got me a drum set, which is what I was interested in. And we were listening

C. Brandon Chapman: to these on CDs, CDs, CDs.

Tristan Loria: And on the radio, he's like tape it off the radio. Yeah, absolutely. And, uh, yeah, so I was fortunate enough to like, you know, really get into drumming and, um, you know, have a positive experience with the education.

Um, I had good music instructors growing up. I never really had to try another instrument, um, and sort of fail to get to, you know, where I ended up, but that's, of course, not the case for many people. Many people do often fail. And we often think too, that, you know, a lot of like that entry level into music education is often brought by the parents.

Yeah. Um, typically like, you know, to play piano or, or violin or something like that. So that's another, one of our focuses of our research too, is basically how is it that we can, what's the best sort of like entryway into music education? How can you dip your toe into the water and make it like sort of stick?

So we look at instruments like, um, piano, especially because we're really interested in that kind of initial foray into music education. So yeah, mostly positive experiences playing drums. That's great. And I

Tristan Loria: yeah. To, uh, to put up with

C. Brandon Chapman: the drums.

Oh, yeah.

Tristan Loria: I mean, even like my neighbors too, like it's, it's, it's loud, you know, like it's, it's really, really loud. So I, I appreciated all that and them, and you know, even in Toronto as well, like we, you know, when I was playing the band, you, you, you rent a jam space and it's pretty cool 'cause like, obviously you can't like play like in your apartment or anything like that.

Yeah. So it was nice to have that little like, auxiliary space and you'd always like. Go through like the halls and everything like that. You know, all these different bands playing, which was a great inspiration too.

C. Brandon Chapman: Well, you know, like the saying, it takes a village to raise a child on the drums. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And

Tristan Loria: probably a lot of earplugs

C. Brandon Chapman: too. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, let, let me, let me just circle back, uh, to a question that I, I meant to ask earlier, but let's talk about the funding of the lab. Like what's, how's it being funded right now? How's your research, I guess, being funded, uh, as well. And then, um, You know, let's, let's just strategize.

This is, this is compelling audio, by the way. Let's strategize live here about like, what do we need to do? to, uh, to grow the

I'm going to get a new faculty. So basically, it's just like in my startup package, like when they hired me, there was a bunch of money to like buy equipment and renovate the lab and all that stuff. stuff. So of course, you know, my lab produces sound, so we need a soundproof lab, which is of course expensive.

So really, um, fortunate the college of education was able to help out in that regard. And then, um, I'm also operating again via the college of education, a new faculty funding grant. So in that one, they're funding a project looking at piano instruction, uh, remote versus in person. So So in that, they give us money, of course, to compensate participants and to buy supplies and everything.

If you don't live near a music education center, guess what? can access the music education that one would provide. So we're trying to reach more people to bring them into music education via this remote access. Um, and then, you know, if we're able to procure those funds, I think that would set it up nicely to eventually procure funds from the National Science Foundation.

Cause we're really interested, of course, not only in how, you know, you can get better at playing music, but learning to play a musical instrument has a number of different benefits. There's a number of like cognitive benefits, such as improved attention, a lot of social benefits, such as improved connectivity, but.

C. Brandon Chapman: And of course, I know we always focus a lot on STEM and NSF grants are things that we love seeing. I know we're going into an unchartered kind of territory right now with research funding. I know there's a lot of unknowns right now just from the pandemic. Political arena, but, um, but that would be great.

Cause if you start getting that and you, then you hope it snowballs, but right now you are, I mean, you have enough funding that you do have a graduate student that I think we, uh, met last week when you opened this and, um, yeah, it would be amazing to, to at some point grow, you know, is there a potential if you grew that you would grow out of that space and need a new space or is that too far down the road?

No, I don't

C. Brandon Chapman: still do that in the same kind of space.

space.

Tristan Loria: I think so. We could, we could make something work in the end. Like, you know, research is like a problem solving business. So if we had a problem to solve, I'm sure we could do it. But in reality, I don't, I don't see outgrowing that space. It was, you know, designed for our specifications and I, I'm excited to use it.

And I think in reality, as you say, We continue to move forward with the lab. We'll just get better at utilizing that space. So we can offer things like, you know, we're really interested also, not only in music education, but also how we can, you know, promote musician health, um, because I believe this is another very underserved area.

A lot of musicians suffer performance related injuries. So is there a way that we can develop. you know, teaching modalities and music education approaches that can potentially reduce the severity or reduce the frequency that these sort of injuries happen. So that's what that other room is for.

Eventually a little maybe music rehab, music, prehab, potentially. All right. I

Tristan Loria: Um, you know, I, I just appreciate everything that, uh, you know, You know, Washington State University has done for me that the department has done for me, um, really supportive, especially, you know, in getting the lab set up, um, you know, getting to actually, like, build a lab was, like, pretty cool, like, being with the architects and, like, everything like that and, you know, talking about the specifications that we would need.

So, you know, I'm just really grateful, um, for the opportunity and, um, really hopeful impactful work here.

C. Brandon Chapman: Alright, it's the Interdisciplinary Music Performance and Learning Lab, uh, with Assistant Professor of Kinesiology, Tristan Lauria. I appreciate you joining me, Tristan. Thank you so much. Thank you, Brandon.

Oh yeah, and go Cougs. We gotta finish on that. Go Cougs. Exactly, go Cougs.