~Proceedings ICMCISMCI2014 14-20 September 2014, Athens, Greece
"Topos" toolkit for Pure Data: exploring the spatial features of dance gestures
for interactive musical applications
Luiz Naveda
State University of Minas Gerais - UEMG
luiznaveda@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
The dissemination of multimedia technologies in the information societies created an interesting scenario: the unprecedented access to a diverse combination of music, image,
video and other media streams raised demands for more
interactive and expressive multimodal experiences. How
to support the demands for richer music-movement interactions? How to translate spatiotemporal qualities of human movement into relevant features for music making and
sound design? In this paper we study the realtime interaction between choreographic movement in space and music,
implemented by means of a collection of tools called Topos. The tools were developed in the Pure Data platform
and provide a number of feature descriptions that help to
map the quality of dance gestures in space to music and
other media. The features are based concepts found in the
literature of cognition and dance, which improves the computational representation of dance gestures in space. The
concepts and techniques presented in the study introduce
new problems and new possibilities for multimedia applications involving dance and music interaction.
1. INTRODUCTION
If music is in anyway related to movements and sense of
movement in our bodies, dance is the frontside of such
relationships in the culture. Evidences of this close relationship have been extensively described in the literature
(e.g.: [1,2]) and reinforced by the parallelism of music and
dance practices in Western and non-Western cultures. Modern linguistic, artistic and labor divisions also reinforce
the disciplinary divisions of music and dance, which shape
the cultures, technologies, media and information we consume.
However, the recent technological revolutions created an
interesting momentum: The access to networks, sensors,
motion capturing technologies, processing power and all
sort of technological devices produced unprecedented access to music and dance media. In this scenario, the encounters of people and music take place in multimodal
contexts that provide mixed and diverse experiences with
sound, imagery and movement interactions (e.g.: media
Copyright: 2014 Luiz Naveda et al. This is an open-access article distributed
under the terms of the u np n, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided
the original author and source are credited.
Ivani Santana
Federal University of Bahia - UFBA
ivanisantana.mapad2@gmail.com
streaming services, games, movies, dance clubs). Consequently, these societies start demanding deeper interactional experiences that take into account the potential expressiveness of its basic modalities and the expressive relationships that can be placed in-between the modalities. At
this point, information societies seem to share the same
characteristics of other non-Western cultures where divisions between listening, seeing and moving are somewhat
diffuse (or not relevant). How to develop more comprehensive and expressive relationships between the dance gestures and the musical ideas in the rise of a society that becomes intrinsically multimodal?
In this paper we study the interaction between choreographic movement in space and music, which is implemented by means of realtime tools called Topos, programmed
in the platform Pure Data [3] (aka PD). These tools inherit
from developments proposed in recent studies and provide
a number of techniques that contribute to description of
human movement in space. By enriching the computational representation of dance gestures we expect to improve
the concepts and techniques that involve dance and music
interactions.
In the next sections, we describe the objectives and limitations of this study (Section 2), previous work (Section 3)
and theories (Section 4) that inspired the present approach.
In the Section 5 we explain the design and implementation
of the features, which are illustrated in Section 6 by means
of examples and application scenarios. In the last section
(Section 7) we discuss critical aspects and problems of the
library, possible solutions and future studies.
2. OBJECTIVES
The aim of this study is to present and explore realtime features of choreographic gesture in space for computer music
applications. Although the work focuses on dance-music
interactions, it also makes use of generalized representations that might be useful to other analytical (non-realtime)
and realtime approaches. The features are developed from
low-level three-dimensional position data 1, such as position of a point in the Euclidean space (e.g.: x, y, and z position). Our problem is to develop strategies that can provide more comprehensive feature descriptions of human
movement at the top of low-level motion descriptors. The
implementation as Pure Data objects aims at providing an
non-exhaustive collection of realtime tools (open-source)
1 Motion capturing techniques and devices are not approached in this
study.
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