How Screendance Embraces What Cannot Be Done on Stage

Due to the recentness of the field of dance filmmaking, little research exists on the difference between dance films designed to be watched as films (referred to as screendance) and dance videography (videos of performances created to be viewed by a live audience). This paper contends that what separates screendance from dance videography is the unique appeal screendance has for the viewer. Through the use of instantaneous location changes or inaccessible locations, unusual camera perspectives (such as a birds’ eye shot) that allow the viewer to feel as if they or the dancers are defying gravity, and technology-mediated changes to bodies and surroundings, dance films show the viewer the impossible happening on screen. This impossibility factor enables the viewer to experience the work as a captivating visual spectacle. Rather than looking down on this as ‘low art,’ I suggest that the visual appeal has positive psychological effects on its viewers, which allows screendance to be used to create entertainment (music videos) and sell products (advertisements). This research has implications for dancers, choreographers, and dance filmmakers, particularly those interested in making their work — or dance in general — more accessible to audiences that may not conventionally seek out dance performances

Telepresence, soundscapes and technological expectation: putting the observer into the equation

In an experiment exploring the impact of sound on sensations of telepresence, 126 participants watched a video clip using either headphones or speakers. The results illustrate that sound is an important factor in stimulating telepresence responses in audiences. Interactions between soundscape and screen size were also revealed. A traverse interaction between aural/visual congruency and soundscapes was evident. A second data set of 102 participants was collected to illuminate the effect of technological expectation that emerged in the first study. Expectations had been mentioned in other studies, and the data support the notion that people have an expectation of the technological quality of a presentation. The results suggest that examining expectations could assist in future conceptualizations of telepresence

The Orange Feeling:Mood and Atmosphere in Roskilde Festival

This article investigates the relationship between instant architecture, art installations and the audience at Roskilde Festival, and it raises the question of how instant architecture, art installations and modes of social interaction can enhance the design of a genuine experience. It is based on analyses of a specific case, Roskilde Festival 2008 - 2012. The festival brands itself as an instant city with a specific atmosphere, ‘The Orange Feeling’, which is a very abstract term that encompasses the whole festival. The paper focuses on this term, and on important elements which constitute the environment and the conditions for the constructed situation in which this special atmosphere actually occurs. The main approach to the analysis of the atmosphere is an investigation of how the audience engages with the instant architecture and the art installations. The article provides general conclusions on the specific atmosphere and on how the designs support this. It concludes that the culture of laughter is the atmospheric glue that keeps Roskilde Festival together, and it is the performative and relational designs together with the culture of laughter that create the basis for ‘The Orange Feeling’

Space Time Exploration of Musical Instruments

Musical instruments are tools used to generate sounds for musical expression. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) musical instruments create sounds that may be spatially disjointed from the instrument controls. Spatial audio processing can be used to position the Extended Reality (XR) musical instruments and their corresponding sounds in the same space. This dissertation investigates novel ways of combining spatial reverb models to improve the naturalness of XR musical instruments. Seven spatial reverb systems, combinations of a shoebox spatial reverb model, a raytracing spatial reverb model, and measured directional room impulse response convolution reverb, were compared in a pilot study. A novel hybrid system of synthetic early reflections and directional room impulse responses was preferred for naturalness when tested over headphones with three instruments created by the author: AR electric guitar, AR drumset, and VR Singing Kite. This research culminated in a concert, Spherical Sound Search, which showcased the preferred hybrid system, the three XR musical instruments, and four re-contextualized spatial audio effects (spatial looping, spatial delay, spatial feedback, and spatial compression). The three pieces in the concert explored different aspects of XR modalities and presented the novel system with spatial audio effects to a larger audience by rendering to an octophonic loudspeaker layout