Many people naturally sway when listening to music. But, there's more to
swaying to music than you may think. Take a moment to think to yourself,
when listening to music, is it just the music that's making you sway?
Could there be other things that are making you sway as well? You may
not notice, but your body may be subconsciously reacting to certain
stimuli to help you keep your balance, even when you sway.
But how?
A study set out to analyze the impact of several controlled variables
upon the swaying of an individual’s body. Subjects of varying sex and
age had their body sway monitored using an Oculus Rift headset, some
music, and a virtual environment of a street. Trials covered all of the
different combinations of factors: if one's eyes were closed, the
loudness (or absence) of music, and the movement of the environment.
The results of the study were used to see how stimuli all around us
contributes to how we sway. Especially in the diseased or elderly, a
fall oftentimes can cause death or serious injury, and being unable to
adopt to various stimuli quickly can lead to such accidents. Being able
to identify which factors promote instability could reduce the
possibility of falling within vulnerable populations. With this website,
you can see how you may fare in the same conditions set by the study.
This is a screenshot of the background used for the experiment!
How do you sway?
Let's start by seeing how you sway to the music! On the right hand side,
click on one of the songs to hear a movement of Mozart's Jupiter. These
movements were used in the actual experiment. Stand up, close your eyes,
and have one hand on the arrow keys. When you're ready, click "Start
Movement Recording", and using the arrow keys, track how you sway for
the next ten seconds.
Here, you are able to compare your swaying pattern with those of the
subjects within the study. You can use the dropdown menu and compare
yourself with the other subjects in this experiment. Do you notice
yourself swaying more or less than the others? What patterns do you
notice about this particular set of variables?
Subject Movement Over Time
This visualization plots the swaying of a sample of the participants
within the study. You are able to directly see the paths of any singular
participant and each of the conditions that they were subject to. This
is useful to identify not just the distribution of areas covered during
the swaying, but also to see the actual path and pattern that the person
swayed in. Feel free to adjust the variables and see all the
participants sway patterns. To the right, we have a graph showcasing the
total distance from the origin each person was to help quantify the
extremes of a person's sway.
Note that the figure used in the graph is the top view of a human head.
When the environment is moving, it moves towards the person.
And some few guiding thoughts. How do different settings within one
variable seem to affect movement? Does one variable seem to impact sway
more than another? Keep thought like these in mind for this section and
the next.
Comparing Different Conditions
Now for some static visualizations. This is crucial in being able to
understand what variables seem to have the largest effect on sway.
Feel free to compare different sets of parameters, and switch between
different subjects if you'd like.
When exploring a subject and changing the parameters, we can mainly
see that certain factors like having your eyes open make you sway
more, and also having the environment moving also making you sway
more. Generally, we noticed that having music on often made subjects
more volatile in their sway, as did the environment moving. However,
we found that having eyes closed seemed to "center" subjects, making
them keep their head mostly close to the initial starting position.
But not all factors affect people's sway equally.
For example, take a look at how subjects sway when environment
movement is on versus when it's still. Not all subjects move more
extremely when the environment is moving, contrary to our expectation
that a moving environment may make all subjects move more extremely.
What other inferences can you draw from the data?
Conclusion
Overall, we found that factors such as music and a moving environment
seem to increase volatility in sway, while closing eyes seemed to reduce
volatility. The study also found similar results as well, in which they
found that playing music with a 0.1 Hz increase did overall seem to
increase sway, but also partially attributed to this being due to the
moving environment.
Ultimately, the study concluded that further research should
be conducted regarding interactions between visual and auditory input.
While many subjects displayed similar patterns in the effects of the
variables, it was not consistent. Some subjects showed little to no
changes. More stimulus and combinations of stimuli needed to be tested
in order to better understand the relationship.
Interstingly, the study also suggested that using an Oculus Rift in the
way that was used for the study could be used as a treatment or training
for people with balancing issues and such. After all, with how you can
set the variables within the virtual environment, one can be exposed to
simulations of various stimuli and possibly figure out methods of facing
such stimuli. As demonstrated earlier, different people may react to
certain stimuli differently. Therefore, it takes self-exploration to
understand how your body sways in response to different stimuli.
The next time you're listening to music, you could maybe take a moment
to think about (and try to understand) how you sway. Do you sway side to
side? Is your movement completely involuntary? Anything visual that's
affecting your sway? It feels like an activity of self-exploration, but
who knows? Maybe knowing how you sway to music can save you from a nasty
fall later down the line.
