Music Perception An Interdisciplinary Journal · 2010 · 64 citations · 0 references
MusicMotor ControlMusical MeterMusicologyMovement AnalysisMotion CaptureMusical CuesRepetitive Dance/music PatternsKinematicsGesture ProcessingHealth SciencesDanceBalletRepetitive Dance PatternsPerception-action LoopGesture RecognitionSpatiotemporal Reference FramesHuman MovementArts
Spatiotemporal reference frames are memory patterns that guide action‑perception couplings and can be dynamically transformed during dance. The study aims to understand how dancers create spatiotemporal reference frames synchronized with musical cues. Using 3‑D motion capture of samba and Charleston, the authors extracted joint‑based geometric patterns, decomposed them into body‑centered nonorthogonal periodicities aligned with musical meter, and projected musical and action cues onto these patterns to generate basic gestures. The study proposes several spatial‑cognition hypotheses that could guide future dance‑music research.
The goal of the present study is to gain better insight into how dancers establish, through dancing, a spatiotemporal reference frame in synchrony with musical cues. With the aim of achieving this, repetitive dance patterns of samba and Charleston were recorded using a three-dimensional motion capture system. Geometric patterns then were extracted from each joint of the dancer's body. The method uses a body-centered reference frame and decomposes the movement into nonorthogonal periodicities that match periods of the musical meter. Musical cues (such as meter and loudness) as well as action-based cues (such as velocity) can be projected onto the patterns, thus providing spatiotemporal reference frames, or 'basic gestures,' for action-perception couplings. Conceptually speaking, the spatiotemporal reference frames control minimum effort points in action-perception couplings. They reside as memory patterns in the mental and/or motor domains, ready to be dynamically transformed in dance movements. The present study raises a number of hypotheses related to spatial cognition that may serve as guiding principles for future dance/music studies.