Vrengt: A Shared Body-Machine Instrument for Music-Dance Performance

Cagri Erdem, Katja Henriksen Schia, and Alexander Refsum Jensenius

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

• Year: 2019
• Location: Porto Alegre, Brazil
• Pages: 186–191
• DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3672918 (Link to paper)
• PDF link

Abstract:

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.

Citation:

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{Erdem2019,
 abstract = {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.   },
 address = {Porto Alegre, Brazil},
 author = {Cagri Erdem and Katja Henriksen Schia and Jensenius, Alexander Refsum},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.3672918},
 editor = {Marcelo Queiroz and Anna Xambó Sedó},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 pages = {186--191},
 publisher = {UFRGS},
 title = {Vrengt: A Shared Body-Machine Instrument for Music-Dance Performance},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2019/nime2019_paper037.pdf},
 year = {2019}
}