AIRS 1st Annual Meeting: 2009

Title: The use of facial electromyography in singing research
Authors: Frank Russo (Ryerson University, Canada), Lisa Chan (Ryerson University, Canada)

Abstract

A recent pilot study conducted in our lab suggests that facial mimicry may be involved in
perception of sung emotion. Participants were asked to observe and then reproduce songs that
were emotionally expressive. The songs were presented audio-visually and the onset of
reproductions was cued so as to occur one full bar after the coda. Using facial
electromyography (f-emg), muscle activity was observed over four epochs: perception
(presentation of target), planning (pre-imitation), production (imitation), and post-production
(after imitation). Evidence of mimicry was found across all epochs, including perception. The
mimicry observed in the perception epoch is somewhat surprising and may be the
manifestation of a facial-feedback network that serves emotional communication. The
presentation will focus on possibilities for involving f-EMG in future research related to the
AIRS project including studies investigating perception of sung and spoken emotion as well as
studies of dyadic communication behavior.