During my research term at Infomus, Casa Paganini, University of Genoa, Italy, I started a collaboration with Sanket Sabharwal analysing a set of motion capture recordings of two dancers I did at the ZHdK in Zürich, fall 2021. This collaboration resulted in a paper that Sabharwal presented at the AudioMostly’23 conference in Edinburgh, since I didn’t receive enough funding from my university to be able to go there myself.

Abstract:

In this paper, we will present a pilot study that explores the relationship between music and movement in dance phrases spontaneously choreographed to follow phrases of electroacoustic music. Motion capture recordings from the dance phrases were analyzed to get measurements of contraction-expansion and kinematic features, and the temporal location of the peaks of these measurements was subsequently compared with the peaks of a set of audio features analyzed from the musical phrases. The analyses suggest that the dancers variably accentuate their movements to the peaks or accents in the music. The paper discusses the findings in addition to possible improvements of the research design in further studies.

The paper is published by the ACM Digital Library and can be read and downloaded here.