Try not to headbang challenge

I recently came across a video of the so-called Try not to headbang challenge, where the idea is to, well, not to headbang while listening to music. This immediately caught my attention. After all, I have been researching music-related micromotion over the last years and have run the Norwegian Championship of Standstill since 2012.

Here is an example of Nath & Johnny trying the challenge:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I4CBsDT37I

As seen in the video, they are doing ok, although they are far from sitting still. Running the video through the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python, it is possible to see when and how much they moved clearly.

Below is a quick visualization of the 11-minute long sequence. The videogram (similar to a motiongram but of the original video) shows quite a lot of motion throughout. There is no headbanging, but they do not sit still.

A videogram of the complete video recording (top) with a waveform of the audio track. Two selected frames from the sequence and “zoomed-in” videograms show the motion of specific passages.

There are many good musical examples listed here. We should consider some of them for our next standstill championship. If corona allows, we plan to run a European Championship of Standstill in May 2022. More information soon!