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In our research on music-related gestures (http://www.fourms.uio.no/), we have come to believe that the phenomenon of coarticulation plays an essential role in both the production and the perception of music. Coarticulation here means the fusion of singular actions and sound-events into more superordinate continuous movements and sound passages, e.g. the singular rapid finger movements and sounds of a piano performance fused into more superordinate hand/arm movements and continuous melodic contours.

Coarticulation is well known in linguistics and in some human movement sciences, but relatively little studied in music. However, the few available studies of coarticulation in music as well as our own video and motion capture data seem to show coarticulation at work in relation to singular sound-events, and analyses of the sound similarly show contextual smearing of sound events that are the hallmarks of coarticulation.

With a recognition of coarticulation at work in the production and perception of music, we believe we better can understand how various contextual effects emerge in music, i.e. that various phenomena such as rhythmic, textural, and melodic patterns can be understood as shaped by coarticulation.