Re: Soft for Dancers Up Date #2/ Articles On Line[was dance and language thread]

From: Antonio Camurri (music@dist.unige.it)
Date: 04/10/02


Re: Soft for Dancers Up Date #2/ Articles On Line[wasDear Armando

I appreciate your further comments. I apologise for delay in my reply, I'm
inbetween trips and other work overload...

>First of all let me repeat that for me there is a difference between
movement and gesture that is essential...
I fully agree with your comments. Sorry for possible misunderstandings due
to my very rough descriptions of "expressive gesture" and of "microdance"
concepts.

I think the issues raised in this discussion would be interesting to be
faced in a sort of informal meeting. We were asked to organise (very
preliminary pre-announcement...) the next "Gesture Workshop" in spring 2003
in Genoa, You may find info on previous Gesture Workshops in
http://www.TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld.DE/ags/wbski/GW/
It would be interesting I think to have in this occasion (and/or hopefully
earlier!) some contribute/round table or some useful discussion on these
issues.

>Yes, I agree, but the psychologists works you cite (I'd like to know to
whom you refer to) can also be dangerous if they want to >recreate a
universal model (a "religious" perspective most of the time)  like
Bartenieff "Foundamentals" or other kind of >archetypes. My opinion is very
close to Daniel Sterne : we all have a personal "profile of activation". So,
the models are >essentially personal. But there are some families linled to
cutural values.
I refer for example to psychological work surveyed by Wallbot (1980) in
their interesting paper on the source of expression in movement, or to
concrete implementations of such models such as thos of Pollick et al (on
the web you may find several their recent papers: I can send you pointers if
you want), or the technical survey by Cowie and others in the IEEE Signal
Processing Magazine last year, where there is an interesting perspective of
such contributes from psychology as they are seen by engineers (again, sorry
for the "rough" exmplanations).
You may find a recent paper describing our work and some references in our
web page http://infomus.dist.unige.it (see menu "Publications", the first
paper in the list, available for download as PDF, that I'll present at NIME
conference on musical interfaces in Dublin).

> Cultural context is not only the century and the country. ...
Again; sorry for my short and incomplete description. I agree with you. You
may imagine however my example (two performances of the same piece, one
inspired and one not ...etc) in some - let's say - "invariant" context, to
try to investigate the subtleties I mentioned.

> I really believe that you can do something. But machine Movement analysis
must be done in parallel,
> in my opinion, with some body movement analyst done by a human (we strike
back!) that is able to tell you
> differences that are not readable by actual technology in terms of meaning
in order to double check.
I completely agree with you. Our approach is exactly in this direction: we
work with humans, in terms of spectators (eg comparing spectators' rating
with results of our implemented models/techniques) as well as experts that
observes and supervise/discuss the technical approach.

> Quando vuoi (sorry guys, Italians can sometimes be impolite)
I look forward to meet you soon, you are very welcome in Genoa! if you have
occasion to be in the surrounding please let me know!

> Even though I'm on mac (Love that admits no betraying) I think that your
project is great and the music connection is
> maybe a "Passage to India" that can bring more consciousness of the dancer
movement for selfcontrol and better
> performance (think about Rockeby articles about sensation after use of
VNS).
> Feedback is definitely my central keyword for the moment.
Thanks for your kind words. We know and appreciated the work by Rockeby and
others interesting developments.

> Yes. Again, think about Rockeby Or Susan Kozel experience with magnetic
mocap showing her movement in
> real time with a body of cubes and balloons....
I don't know the work of Susan Kozel. Do you have any reference?

Thanks for your very interesting comments.I look forward to meet you in the
near future.
All the best
Antonio



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