Vrengt: A Shared Body-Machine Instrument for Music-Dance Performance
This addresses the challenge of designing interactive instruments for collaborative art performances, though it is incremental in exploring specific boundaries like standstill vs motion.
The paper tackled the problem of creating a shared instrument for music-dance performance to enable true partnership between a musician and dancer, resulting in a system using Myo armbands and a microphone to capture bodily expressions and breathing for co-performance.
This paper describes the process of developing a shared instrument for music-dance performance, with a particular focus on exploring the boundaries between standstill vs motion, and silence vs sound. The piece Vrengt grew from the idea of enabling a true partnership between a musician and a dancer, developing an instrument that would allow for active co-performance. Using a participatory design approach, we worked with sonification as a tool for systematically exploring the dancer's bodily expressions. The exploration used a "spatiotemporal matrix", with a particular focus on sonic microinteraction. In the final performance, two Myo armbands were used for capturing muscle activity of the arm and leg of the dancer, together with a wireless headset microphone capturing the sound of breathing. In the paper we reflect on multi-user instrument paradigms, discuss our approach to creating a shared instrument using sonification as a tool for the sound design, and reflect on the performers' subjective evaluation of the instrument.