Paper Reading #8: Shadow no. 4: Belly dance and interactive electroacoustic musical performance

Comments

Cindy Skach
Evin Schuchardt
Reference Information

Title: Shadow no. 4: Belly dance and interactive electroacoustic musical performance

Authors: Aurie Y. Hsu, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
              Steven T. Kemper, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
Presentation Venue: CHI 2010: 28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems;
Date: April 10-15, 2010;
Location: Atlanta, GA, USA

Summary

This paper talks about Shadows no. 4, a piece for a tribal-fusion belly dancer, wireless sensor network, and electronics. The movement vocabulary is derivative of Middle Eastern dance. During performances, dancers have wearable sensors capturing the dancer's movement producing a range of salient and subtle variations of the music. Shadows no. 4 tries to implement a multi-dimensioned composition process that meshes music, technology, and movement. This piece presents the movement vocabulary of belly dance as a promising partner to electroacoustic music performance. As far as the aesthetics, essentially, sensors translate movements into data which are in turn mapped to musical parameters. The sensor network enables a solo performer to create effects and illusions. As far as the technical specifications of the system, the authors designed the system with the goal of minimizing the amount of interference with the dancer's movement. The system is constructed using the LilyPad arduino microcontroller (a 2" diameter disc) . At first the microcontroller was sewn to fabric with conductive thread, but that proved to break, and short a lot so they resolved to using high gauge stranded wire.

LilyPad Arduino

The LilyPad contains 6 analog input used to connect a variety of sensors, as well as 14 digital I/O pinis used for serial communication, and digital input from switches, buttons, etc...

Wireless connectivity is achieved using Xbee chips.

Discussion

This work that aims to integrate belly dance with interactive electroacoustic music performance is still in its infancy. This was a short paper that only talked about their initial implementation of the system. The authors point out in their conclusion that future design goals will include refinement of the sensor network, and incorporating biosensors, and motion capture. Though the project is not quite like that of Dr. Latulipe who is working on her Dance.Draw project, I feel that the authors of this paper could use some of the techniques she is using for their refinements.