Interactive Dance Research Articles

The Interactive Dance Club: Avoiding Chaos in a Multi-Participant Environment

September 01 2002 The Interactive Dance Club: Avoiding Chaos in a Multi-Participant Environment Ryan Ulyate, Ryan Ulyate Synesthesia, 415 South Topanga Canyon Boulevard #210, Topanga, CA 90290 USA, www.synesthesia.com, ryan@synesthesia.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar David Bianciardi David Bianciardi Synesthesia, 415 Lafayette Street, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10003 USA, www.synesthesia.com, david@synesthesia.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Ryan Ulyate Synesthesia, 415 South Topanga Canyon Boulevard #210, Topanga, CA 90290 USA, www.synesthesia.com, ryan@synesthesia.com David Bianciardi Synesthesia, 415 Lafayette Street, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10003 USA, www.synesthesia.com, david@synesthesia.com Online Issn: 1531-5169 Print Issn: 0148-9267 © 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2002 Computer Music Journal (2002) 26 (3): 40–49. https://doi.org/10.1162/014892602320582963 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share MailTo Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Ryan Ulyate, David Bianciardi; The Interactive Dance Club: Avoiding Chaos in a Multi-Participant Environment. Computer Music Journal 2002; 26 (3): 40–49. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/014892602320582963 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsComputer Music Journal Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Interactive dance-making: online creative collaborations

This article presents the author's interactive dance composition projects, the Hands-On Dance Project and the TRIAD Project. It examines the potential for computer technology to enhance the interactive art-making process, enabling participation in choreography via Internet communications. By facilitating human-to-human communication, interactive creative environments can be created for participants with a variety of levels of previous dance experience. Participation in these projects is shown to have the capacity to provide a learning environment for all participants.

Artistic Collaboration in an Interactive Dance and Music Performance Environment: Seine hohle Form, a project report

Unique and largely unexplored problems face composers and choreographers as they collaborate on interactive performance works, not the least of which is settling on schemes for mapping the various parameters of human movement to those possible in the world of sound. The authors' collaborative piece, "Seine hohle Form", is used as a case study in the development of effective mapping strategies, focusing on dance gesture to real-time music synthesis. Perceptual correlation of these mapping strategies is stressed, albeit through varying levels of abstraction.

Lifting Bodies: interactive dance – finding new methodologies in the motifs prompted by new technology – a critique and progress report with particular reference to the Bodycoder System

This paper offers a critique of what are seen as key issues which are problematised within the field of interactive dance, centring on the role of the various artists and technologies involved in the development of interactive dance systems, the notion of interactivity versus non-interactivity, and the influence of traditional single art-form practices. The paper proposes that it is only through identifying the particular motifs promoted by the technology itself that a way forward can be found, and an interactive dance aesthetic can begin to emerge in earnest. The arguments presented in this paper are framed within the context of the authors' long-term work and collaboration within the area of interactive dance, and provides a detailed case study of the piece Lifting Bodies (1999).

EyesWeb: Toward Gesture and Affect Recognition in Interactive Dance and Music Systems

The goal of the EyesWeb project is to develop a modular system for the real-time analysis of body movement and gesture. Such information can be used to control and generate sound, music, and visual media, and to control actuators (e.g., robots). Another goal of the project is to explore and develop models of interaction by extending music language toward gesture and visual languages, with a particular focus on the understanding of affect and expressive content in gesture. For example, we attempt to distinguish the expressive content from two instances of the same movement

Design and implementation of expressive footwear

As an outgrowth of our interest in dense wireless sensing and expressive applications of wearable computing, the Responsive Environments Group at the MIT Media Laboratory has developed a very versatile human-computer interface for the foot. By dense wireless sensing, we mean the remote acquisition of many different parameters with a compact, autonomous sensor cluster. We have developed such a low-power sensor card to measure over 16 continuous quantities and transmit them wirelessly to a remote base station, updating all variables at 50 Hz. We have integrated a pair of these devices onto the shoes of dancers and athletes, measuring continuous pressure at three points near the toe, dynamic pressure at the heel, bidirectional bend of the sole, height of each foot off conducting strips in the stage, angular rate of each foot about the vertical, angular position of each foot about the Earth's local magnetic field, as well as foot tilt and acceleration, 3-axis shock acceleration (from kicks and jumps), and position (via an integrated sonar). This paper describes the sensor and electronics systems, then outlines several projects in which we have applied these shoes for interactive dance and the capture of high-level podiatric gesture. We conclude by outlining several applications of our sensor system that are unrelated to footwear.

A sonar, interactive dance and music system

This paper describes an interactive system which allows dancers to program music in real time. It uses ultrasonic sonar to determine the positions of the dancers and translates this information into multichannel MIDI output.

A touch sensitive dance floor/MIDI controller

A prototype MIDI Dance Surface has been developed which is capable of transmitting precise position coordinates, velocity, and pressure information in the form of standard MIDI messages. The surface consists of a large number of force sensing resistors (FSRs) which are attached to heavy duty plastic sheeting and covered with polyethylene foam. The sheets may either be placed on top of or beneath a standard Marley Dance floor. The FSRs are typically arranged in a grid with 16 columns (left to right) and 4 rows (front to back), which results in a 16 ft. square dance surface with 64 1×4 ft. velocity and pressure sensitive regions, each of which is assigned a separate input channel of a Voltage to MIDI Interface Box which has 64 analog inputs, plus MIDI Out. The MIDI Box incorporates a Motorola MC68HC11 microprocessor and can be programmed to convert input/output analog signals to/from any desired MIDI messages, on multiple MIDI channels. Hence, used in conjunction with an ‘‘intelligent’’ external MIDI processing system, it is ideal for use in interactive dance compositions in which one or more dancers can affect both the music and lighting by the nature of their movements and by their precise position(s) on the surface.