“Dance2Music” – Dancing as New Way of Music Creation.

Can you imagine playing music with your dance steps?

Or playing the guitar notes with your bachata footworks?

Hello Amig@s del flow 🕺¡ I asked myself these questions when I read the last article of the  MIT “Dance2Music” that today I bring you (synthesised 🎁 ) introducing what could become in the future a new art of musical creation…DANCING¡. Nice right ✌?

But what the hell is this “Dance2Music” project?

“Dance2Music” is a virtual reality (VR) system that translate a user’s movement expression to musical expression, giving a new perspective to the connection between dance and music.

Ok…let´s go despacito 🐌…

Music naturally makes people want to move their bodies, makes us dance. However, there has been relatively little research in the other direction – creating music based on the way people move.

But actually there some small examples nowadays, like a DJ when changes songs based on the vibe of the crowd, or when a choreographer creates a remix of a song to fit the style of choreography they want to create.

Something like that is what “Dance2Music” do using the Virtual Reality technologies.

Basing on existing systems like Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), Embodied Mapping, Dance Jockey and more, Dance2Music involves processing user inputs through an Oculus virtual reality headset and controllers, then it finds suitable ways to express these motions as music using movement-to-music mappings. They use as a hardware all versions of Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest and the Microsoft Kinect.

(Wait ✋…Do you know that you can learn to dance with this technology?…read this Post)

This technology receives inputs of position, velocity, acceleration, rotation, and button activations from the right, left and the headset controls. This Headset provides as well an immersive visual and audio experience.

Ok, but…🙋‍♂️ how really works?:

The system measures different variants such as the distance of the hands from the body, distance between controllers (and its variation, to know if there is a coordination between them), speed and acceleration.

Depending on the speed, amplitude and acceleration of your movements, you can vary the volume, rhythm, melody or musical accents on a pre-built melodic base.

The “game” (because is still an experiment) offers two scenes:

• “Welcome to the Club”

• “Let’s Jam”

Although it is still a fledgling project, there are aspects such as melody (sometimes too constant) and graphics (sometimes too many and too abstract) that still need to be improved.

In the future they want also to enhance features like adaptive systems, more scenes, better evaluations and more sensors (at the moment limited by the headset and the 2 controllers, this depends on the evolution of the technology, in the future I think that there will be specials suits that will map the whole body movement).

My Conclusion

The project has a whole horizon ahead of it, because it is an almost unexplored terrain which, thanks to virtual reality and new technologies, has only just begun 🚀.

The change of order ♋ from music that produce movements to movements that produce music may be the beginning of a new artistic creation.

It will give us the possibility to express our inner “music” to the world without any instrumental knowledge.

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Reference:

Tittle: Dance2Music : an exploration of music creation through dance in virtual reality

Author: Emily Hu.

Impressed by: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Febr. 2021

Link: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/130690