"Topos" toolkit for Pure data: Exploring the spatial features of dance gestures for interactive musical applications

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. Copyright: