Designing Interactive Sonifications for the Exploration Of Dance Phrase Edges

The paper presents practice-led research where interactive sonifications of dance movements are created so as to have special emphasis on the movement edges of dance phrases. The paper starts out by discussing to what degree interactive sonification of movement and the artistic practice of interactive dance have areas of overlap, and whether their contexts and intentions may be combined to complement each other. A discussion of the concept of salience and how it relates to perceptual edges in general follows, and more specifically to onsets and endings both of movements and musical objects. In this discussion, the author also considers the role of accents as well as different degrees of abruptness of changes. The paper subsequently presents a set of interactive sonifications demonstrating different degrees of salience from very high to very low. Details related to the technical setup, analysis of movement data and the movement-sound mappings are presented, and the results are discussed.