Studying Free Dance Movement to Music
Carmine Casciato, Alexander Refsum Jensenius, Marcelo M. Wanderley · 2005
Context In terms of the three gestural channel functions proposed in [1], dance movements are semiotic in nature and unique as communicative gestures. Choreographed dance and music have been coupled in many works, despite being very different modalities for expression. Nonetheless, Krumhansl and Schenk found subjects could detect structural and emotional similarities in the recording of the Divertimento No.15 by Mozart or the recording of the accompanying dance by Balanchine [2]. The gestures considered in this research, namely improvised movements to sound, are both expressive and also necessarily the result of the dancer’s musical perception. Similarly, the study of sound-accompanying or “mimicking” gestures is expected to uncover aspects of the mental representation of gesture-sound relationships as well as the more general perception of sound [3].