Media
Videos
Artistic works
Esodi
Public performance at Museo di Palazzo Reale, Genoa - March 25th 2017
This performance took place in the historical building of Palazzo Reale in Genoa, under the supervision of the choreographer Virgilio Sieni: a group of amateur dancers performed a set of choreographies dedicated to the topic of exodus undertaken by men to save themselves. The different choreographies were performed in parallel in several spots of Palazzo Reale historical monumental building.
During the performances, one of the dancers in each group of Palazzo Reale wore IMU sensors. Two expressive qualities, Fragility and Lightness, were extracted and translated into corresponding sonifications. The audience and the other dancers were able to perceive the expressive qualities of the sonified dancer, thus contributing to create a homogeneous group, and at the same time to contribute to a deeper comprehension by the non-performing audience. Sonifications provided a feedback to other dancers participating in the scene, and at the same time they were attractors of audience members to join the performance, and gave them information about the expressive quality of the dancers (when, for example, spectators could not clearly see the dancers due to the crowded environment).
The DANCE platform was used for real-time recognition of two expressive qualities from the movement data captured by inertial sensors and sonification. Sonification design by Andrea Cera.
(Salone da ballo - Ballroom)
(Galleria degli specchi - Gallery of mirrors)
Di Fronte agli Occhi degli Altri
Public performance of Virgilio Sieni and Giuseppe Comuniello, Casa Paganini, Genoa - March 24th 2017
During the performance, at first, two dancers, one of which is visually impaired, performed a dance improvisation wearing the Inertial Measurement Sensors in turns. The performer wearing the sensors was generating a sonification that influenced the movement qualities of the other.
During this performance the DANCE platform was used for real-time recognition of two expressive qualities (i.e., Lightness and Fragility) from the movement data captured by inertial sensors and sonification. Sonification design by Andrea Cera.
Europa: Gestures of History, Dancing Science and Art not to forget EU identity
Performance at "La Lanterna", Rome - March 23rd 2017
This performance took place in occasion of the dinner at the celebration of the Treaty of Rome, at La Lanterna structure by Massimiliano Fuksas, on invitation of the EU DG Connect. The objective was to tell metaphorically the narration of the birth and evolution of Europe by means of a short choreographic action, enhanced by an interactive sonification amplifying the qualities of dancer’s movement.
During this performance the DANCE platform was used for real-time recognition of two expressive qualities (i.e., Lightness and Fragility) from the movement data captured by inertial sensors and sonification. Sonification design by Andrea Cera.
Emobodies
Maastricht Jazz Festival - Performance by Bert van der Brink and Sagi Gross exploits technologies developed in EU DANCE Project.
The performance "Embodies" exploits technologies developed in DANCE Project: IMU sensors are used to capture the dancer movements, expressive movement detection algorithms are used to recognize the dancer’s movement quality, which then is sonified in real-time using sonification models.
In the performance, the dancer Sagi Gross dances with IMU sensors attached to his limbs, and visually impaired pianist Bert van der Brink hears the sonification of the dancer’s movements through the headphones.
Thus, the audience can hear the pianist improvising to the sonification of the dancer movements.
In the last stage of the performance, the audience can also hear directly sonification that is used by the pianist.
DANCE at Sonar+D
Demos on real-time analysis and interactive sonification of full-body human movement expressive qualities.Sonification is based on processing of sound spaces and ways of using affective music content in relation to the quality of gestures.
Developed by University of Genoa (Casa Paganini – InfoMus Research Centre), in collaboration with the composer Pablo Palacio and dancers Muriel Romero and Roberta Messa, demos at the stand of the European Commission were kindly supported by the dancer Sabrina Ribes.
Scientific works
Experiment - Can you recognize movement expressivity from sonification?
A user learns how to recognize her own movement qualities by the auditory channel: following one of the main DANCE guidelines, sensory deprivation is here a mean to amplify user’s capabilities and sensibility in recognizing individual movement qualities by means of the auditory modality.
In this context, we set up an experiment in which we collected ratings of the qualities perceived from the sonifications. Participants were split in 2 groups: the first one had the possibility to get embodied learning thanks to the sonification of their own movement qualities, while the second one only observed the reference videos and tried to move with these two qualities, but with no sonification of their movement. Both groups of participants had to evaluate a set of audio-only stimuli, consisting of the sonification of different qualities performed by expert dancers.
The video below shows examples of the stimuli used in the experiment.
Sonification of the Expressive Qualities: Fragility and Lightness
Expressive movement sonification is the process of translating a movement into sound that "evokes" some of the movement’s expressive characteristics.
Most of existing works propose the interactive sonification of low-level movement qualities (e.g., acceleration, kinetic energy). In this work we adopt a different approach: we focus on mid-level expressive qualities that involve the whole body, and require a larger temporal interval to be observed (see the paper by Camurri et al. 2015 for detail on our multilayered framework of expressive qualities).
Thus, instead of a reactive one-to-one mapping the process must keep into account the context and the saliency of the observed feature.
In thie following example, we focus on two expressive qualities Lightness and Fragility.
We chose Lightness and Fragility as exemplary cases of mid-level qualities which result from the execution of clearly different motor plans in the brain of the moving subject: lightness is characterized by a continuous and uninterrupted movement, whist fragility is characterized by frequent, aperiodic interruptions of the movement, corresponding to re-planning and subsequent restart of movement, due to sudden and frequent (but arrhythmic, unpredictable by an observer) sudden “cracks” and “collapses” (small signs of drop) in joints.
Towards a Multimodal Repository
Some video extracts from dataset. A new multimodal repository for the analysis of expressive movement qualities in dance. The initial content of the repository consists of about 90 minutes of short dance performances movement sequences, and improvisations performed by four dancers, displaying three expressive qualities: Fluidity, Impulsivity, and Rigidity.
Sound gestures: hearing dances, seeing music
Festival della Scienza, Genoa - October 2015
One of the demos of the Interactive exhibits on new technologies and sensory substitution is whown.
Analysis of the qualities of human movement in individual performances
eNTERFACE 2015. This project has been coordinated by UNIGE and is related to the DANCE project 1st Use Case.
Media