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.
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September 2010
Research Article|
September 01 2010
Basic Gestures as Spatiotemporal Reference Frames for Repetitive Dance/Music Patterns in Samba and Charleston
Luiz Naveda
Luiz Naveda
Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
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Music Perception (2010) 28 (1): 71–91.
Citation
Marc Leman, Luiz Naveda; Basic Gestures as Spatiotemporal Reference Frames for Repetitive Dance/Music Patterns in Samba and Charleston. Music Perception 1 September 2010; 28 (1): 71–91. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2010.28.1.71
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