May 2005 Archives

i received the details for Immeasurable? The Dance in Dance Science over the weekend. there is much work to do before then, a recent sharing of my work revealed complexities i had not observed. whilst the 'dance' audience understood the somatic context of the work they found it difficult to understand the technology. more than anything they showed a desire for a more extended explanation if the terminology, rather than failing to understand the links i was making. what's interesting (for me) is that my technical paper was under discussion, rather than a text targeted for the dance audience. so now, i look to see what changes i can make when presenting my work in the dance setting.

the problem of transferring my work for easy consumption by dance scientists, academics and artists is compounded by some rather dubious computer science (CS) movement theories. There is a common belief in CS that a global movement language exists which can be identified to describe al human motion. They hope to identify this language through pattern recognition and the statistical decomposition of human motion to discover the basic motor primitives or 'movemes'.

Yet human movement has no embedded meaning other than that imposed by the spectator or performer. Because the range of potential movement is so large (limited only by the constrains of the human body), movement techniques reduce the number of possible solutions to provide a usable classification. these classifications are not so much languages but dialects whilst their construction is systematic but subjective and essentially arbitrary.

a gesture recognition system trained to recognise features that match a particular dialect is not performing global recognition but probabilistic assessment of feature minima. each of these minima, when considered within another dialect or sub dialect could represent different, incomplete or invalid movemes. with many movement domains (eg. ballet, t'ai chi ch'uan, figure skating) being pluricentric the problem of identifying the feature minima of a gesture becomes more difficult. diglossia in a movement domain (variations between the technical and applied form) adds additional layers of complexity.

further more gestures are not always mutually intelligible, whilst a ballet dancer may recognise aspects of the salchow, lutz and axel (figure skating) their method of execution may not be technically understood (effect / affect divergence).

if CS is going to borrow from linguistics to classify movement it needs to pay more attention to the theories and practice of each domain rather than looking inwardly to speech and language processing or natural language processing. there is a clear difference between physical phenomena and their structuralist abstractions, it is this difference that most CS papers on gesture recognition fail to acknowledge alongside confusing effect and affect.

so whilst these basic concepts are nothing new to dancers the language and parallels drawn are unusual. what i hope to show is that we, as dancers hold valuable phenomenological knowledge about our practice that can be applied to a wide range of contexts.

science can learn from the arts, but only if it takes the time to listen

with (most) avatar movement mark-up languages being stenographic rather than notational there is little relevant work for evaluative comparisons with Æma. the issues of developing a computer based movement notation are also different from implementing and existing (human based) movement notation. thus, i have been working in a turbulent void.

as i near the first completed draft of my technical report i have stripped more and more conceptual developments to reveal my basic position with greater clarity. due to the lack of relevant texts i have eschewed the usual literature review, i expect this will cause problems

i had imagined that here, for the first time, i would not 'rock the boat' during my studies. oh well ...

the last four months have been a motive meditation; only now do i feel that i have somewhere to begin.

bastish.net
i have been considering a boustrophedic draft script for a document i am working on and to assist my day to day mark making. i hope to improve both the speed and legibility of my markmaking whilst creating a distinctive visual impression.

summer approaches, and the office is too dark, cool and quiet. it would be nice to have somewhere warm and bright to work, where the chatter is reassuring rather than disturbing. perhaps i should charge up my batteries and sit out on the grass.

preparing for the next stage.

kobayashi issa

listening to Tilopa; Kyotaku Live [buy]

Without looking towards other fields with significant rigour (and creativity) computer science risks reinventing existing solutions. Of course this is true for all discipline but in CS the problem is compounded by a multiplicity of languages and computational approaches.

Furthermore the communication skills of students was somewhat lacking. Problems included running overtime, poor delivery, bad slide design and a poor conceptual theory.

Technical solutions should not be isolated from their contextual application. Without understanding how the solution 'may' be used (rather than only considering primary function) any resultant tools are of limited use.

The audience was exclusively CMP (afaik) it would have been interesting to have feedback from differing perspectives. I think that the lack of interdisciplinary actively in UEA limits both the quality of research and students educational experience.

CMP UEA has some very articulate staff (and students) it is important that activity within the school is integrated to promote development of novel work and ensure a high standard of general research. It was interesting to note staff comments on students from different groups.

One thing was very clear from the day, UEA needs a physics department again.

So what's next for me? Well the key tasks are implementing the notation, constructing test cases and making sure I remain creative. I also have my year review to undertake in the next few weeks.

linguistic models do not apply to movement in general terms but, it may be possible to apply such models to distinct domains, or individual dance work. Parsing the syntactic features of a dancework could provide rapid feature extraction for dance analysis.

Syntactic parsing of Labanotation would be particularly useful when examining the dance archives. The application of suitably modified linguistic models might facilitate the deep visualisation of a choreographic corpus.

The visualisation of Labanotation beyond movement animation will be significant importance once Labanotation interlingua and a digital archive have been established.

I feel that the UK has yet to make a significant contribution to dance technology beyond performance applications. The development of deep visualisation technologies for dance would extend not only to dance tech and dance analysis but also dance science.

Will the dance community wait until it's too late to develop a fully integrated system, or rely on Computer Science to define the framework? Given recent history I expect so, but there is another way,but what UK institution has the vision to undertake such an unusual development?

As i noted in my pervious post, technical solutions should not be isolated from their contextual application. Deep dance visualisation (DDV) should be developed in a dance context with computational expertise. I would argue that outside of this context significantly novel and applicable research will be elusive.

so where and how to develop DDV, my first suggestion would be to align the research with dance science, performance, theory and notation. There a few institutions with such a mix, so perhaps a specific multidisciplinary group should be formed as an inter university project. Indeed, a collaborative approach would improve the profile and adoption of the finished product.

So, in the absence of a school of 'dance studies, science and mediation' i can only imagine the "DDV group" developing such technology. The remit of the group should be to produce a a tools for ddv that can be used by dance experts and novices, from secondary education to univertsity and professional practice.

i will return to this soon ...

sometimes it can take all day to get ready ... and now, early evening, i seem more mindful of the thoughts morning revealed.

i would have liked (very much) to have attended (me)dia but am unable to, a prior engagement impedes travelling so far. if you attend i would like to know how it was.

on weds we have our postgraduate research day, as i was not selected to give a paper, i will be presenting a poster Affective – Esoteric, Motive Attribution: Æma [200kb pdf]. I'm not overly keen on posters, and this one is a little to wordy perhaps ... [update; fixed poster error]

it seems hard to explain why a movement notation requires more development time and theory than an abstracted movement shorthand. i stand by my convictions; radical change is therefore possible.

doug fox is back! so roll on over to the Great Dance Weblog [feeds: atom , audio , rss2] nice to see you back on-line doug. a shift in focus (or a nudge?) to dance in general rather than dance tech but it looks good so far. i hope that doug can secure some international artists for interview as the site progresses