When conventional procedures are no longer the rule for application: design as a discipline opens up to new possibilities

This paper discusses the development of the prototype application ‘LabanAssist’. It looks at the design rationale used for the creation of what is fundamentally a system for recording dance knowledge on a score, as identifiable and replicable signs and symbols. A system made necessary because the conventions of other established disciplines, such as engineering and computer science practices, were no longer considered to be effective alone, in facilitating the production of well-designed cultural artefacts (Calvert, Fox, Ryman, & Wilke, 2005; Ebenreuter, 2005). It is important to ask how can we understand design as a discipline amongst other fields of study with longstanding conventions and traditions and if the discipline of design offers effective ways of thinking about the creation and art of making products or services for the enhancement of the human experience? Is design a discipline because it adheres to existing and established rules of interdisciplinary knowledge from which it draws, or is it a discipline in its own right that as a significant field of intellectual development utilizes interdisciplinary knowledge as a basis for creativity and invention?” While there is no simple answer to these questions, the design approach adopted for the development of the prototype application ‘LabanAssist’ offers a working example in which the central theme of grammar, or more particularly the rules of a language, depart from the conventional use for its practical application. This application is one in which a literal understanding of grammar is no longer seen as an adequate basis for the generation of dance knowledge expressed via symbolic writing systems. Instead, this research focuses on the way in which the figurative aspects of language can be represented in the design of an interface to orient user thinking and facilitate the generation of diverse movement compositions. Keywords: Labanotation; Grammar; Literal; Figurative; Tropes; Poetic Constructs; Broad Terms; Interface.</p

Dance-the-music : an educational platform for the modeling, recognition and audiovisual monitoring of dance steps using spatiotemporal motion templates

In this article, a computational platform is presented, entitled “Dance-the-Music”, that can be used in a dance educational context to explore and learn the basics of dance steps. By introducing a method based on spatiotemporal motion templates, the platform facilitates to train basic step models from sequentially repeated dance figures performed by a dance teacher. Movements are captured with an optical motion capture system. The teachers’ models can be visualized from a first-person perspective to instruct students how to perform the specific dance steps in the correct manner. Moreover, recognition algorithms-based on a template matching method can determine the quality of a student’s performance in real time by means of multimodal monitoring techniques. The results of an evaluation study suggest that the Dance-the-Music is effective in helping dance students to master the basics of dance figures

Dance training shapes action perception and its neural implementation within the young and older adult brain

How we perceive others in action is shaped by our prior experience. Many factors influence brain responses when observing others in action, including training in a particular physical skill, such as sport or dance, and also general development and aging processes. Here, we investigate how learning a complex motor skill shapes neural and behavioural responses among a dance-naïve sample of 20 young and 19 older adults. Across four days, participants physically rehearsed one set of dance sequences, observed a second set, and a third set remained untrained. Functional MRI was obtained prior to and immediately following training. Participants’ behavioural performance on motor and visual tasks improved across the training period, with younger adults showing steeper performance gains than older adults. At the brain level, both age groups demonstrated decreased sensorimotor cortical engagement after physical training, with younger adults showing more pronounced decreases in inferior parietal activity compared to older adults. Neural decoding results demonstrate that among both age groups, visual and motor regions contain experience-specific representations of new motor learning. By combining behavioural measures of performance with univariate and multivariate measures of brain activity, we can start to build a more complete picture of age-related changes in experience-dependent plasticity

Motor simulation without motor expertise: enhanced corticospinal excitability in visually experienced dance spectators

The human “mirror-system” is suggested to play a crucial role in action observation and execution, and is characterized by activity in the premotor and parietal cortices during the passive observation of movements. The previous motor experience of the observer has been shown to enhance the activity in this network. Yet visual experience could also have a determinant influence when watching more complex actions, as in dance performances. Here we tested the impact visual experience has on motor simulation when watching dance, by measuring changes in corticospinal excitability. We also tested the effects of empathic abilities. To fully match the participants' long-term visual experience with the present experimental setting, we used three live solo dance performances: ballet, Indian dance, and non-dance. Participants were either frequent dance spectators of ballet or Indian dance, or “novices” who never watched dance. None of the spectators had been physically trained in these dance styles. Transcranial magnetic stimulation was used to measure corticospinal excitability by means of motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) in both the hand and the arm, because the hand is specifically used in Indian dance and the arm is frequently engaged in ballet dance movements. We observed that frequent ballet spectators showed larger MEP amplitudes in the arm muscles when watching ballet compared to when they watched other performances. We also found that the higher Indian dance spectators scored on the fantasy subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, the larger their MEPs were in the arms when watching Indian dance. Our results show that even without physical training, corticospinal excitability can be enhanced as a function of either visual experience or the tendency to imaginatively transpose oneself into fictional characters. We suggest that spectators covertly simulate the movements for which they have acquired visual experience, and that empathic abilities heighten motor resonance during dance observation

An advanced virtual dance performance evaluator

The ever increasing availability of high speed Internet access has led to a leap in technologies that support real-time realistic interaction between humans in online virtual environments. In the context of this work, we wish to realise the vision of an online dance studio where a dance class is to be provided by an expert dance teacher and to be delivered to online students via the web. In this paper we study some of the technical issues that need to be addressed in this challenging scenario. In particular, we describe an automatic dance analysis tool that would be used to evaluate a student's performance and provide him/her with meaningful feedback to aid improvement

The control theory of motion-based communication: problems in teaching robots to dance

The paper describes results on two components of a research program focused on motion-based communication mediated by the dynamics of a control system. Specifically we are interested in how mobile agents engaged in a shared activity such as dance can use motion as a medium for transmitting certain types of messages. The first part of the paper adopts the terminology of motion description languages and deconstructs an elementary form of the well-known popular dance, Salsa, in terms of four motion primitives (dance steps). Several notions of dance complexity are introduced. We describe an experiment in which ten performances by an actual pair of dancers are evaluated by judges and then compared in terms of proposed complexity metrics. An energy metric is also defined. Values of this metric are obtained by summing the lengths of motion segments executed by wheeled robots replicating the movements of the human dancers in each of the ten dance performances. Of all the metrics that are considered in this experiment, energy is the most closely correlated with the human judges' assessments of performance quality. The second part of the paper poses a general class of dual objective motion control problems in which a primary objective (artistic execution of a dance step or efficient movement toward a specified terminal state) is combined with a communication objective. Solutions of varying degrees of explicitness can be given in several classes of problems of communicating through the dynamics of finite dimensional linear control systems. In this setting it is shown that the cost of adding a communication component to motions that steer a system between prescribed pairs of states is independent of those states. At the same time, the optimal encoding problem itself is shown to be a problem of packing geometric objects, and it remains open. Current research is aimed at solving such communication-through-action problems in the context of the motion control of mobile robots.Support for this work is gratefully acknowledged to ODDR&E MURI07 Program Grant Number FA9550-07-1-0528, the National Science Founda tion ITR Program Grant Number DMI-0330171, and the Office of Naval Research, and by ODDR&E MURI10 Program Grant Number N00014-10- 1-0952. (FA9550-07-1-0528 - ODDRE MURI07; DMI-0330171 - National Science Foundation ITR Program; Office of Naval Research; N00014-10-1-0952 - ODDRE MURI10

The play's the thing

For very understandable reasons phenomenological approaches predominate in the field of sensory urbanism. This paper does not seek to add to that particular discourse. Rather it takes Rorty’s postmodernized Pragmatism as its starting point and develops a position on the role of multi-modal design representation in the design process as a means of admitting many voices and managing multidisciplinary collaboration. This paper will interrogate some of the concepts underpinning the Sensory Urbanism project to help define the scope of interest in multi-modal representations. It will then explore a range of techniques and approaches developed by artists and designers during the past fifty years or so and comment on how they might inform the question of multi-modal representation. In conclusion I will argue that we should develop a heterogeneous tool kit that adopts, adapts and re-invents existing methods because this will better serve our purposes during the exploratory phase(s) of any design project that deals with complexity