Dance-the-Music: an educational platform for the modeling, recognition and audiovisual monitoring of dance steps using s
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RESEARCH
Open Access
Dance-the-Music: an educational platform for the modeling, recognition and audiovisual monitoring of dance steps using spatiotemporal motion templates Pieter-Jan Maes*, Denis Amelynck and Marc Leman
Abstract In this article, a computational platform is presented, entitled “Dance-the-Music”, that can be used in a dance educational context to explore and learn the basics of dance steps. By introducing a method based on spatiotemporal motion templates, the platform facilitates to train basic step models from sequentially repeated dance figures performed by a dance teacher. Movements are captured with an optical motion capture system. The teachers’ models can be visualized from a first-person perspective to instruct students how to perform the specific dance steps in the correct manner. Moreover, recognition algorithms-based on a template matching method-can determine the quality of a student’s performance in real time by means of multimodal monitoring techniques. The results of an evaluation study suggest that the Dance-the-Music is effective in helping dance students to master the basics of dance figures. Keywords: dance education, spatiotemporal template, dance modeling and recognition, multimodal monitoring, audiovisual dance performance database, dance-based music querying and retrieval
1 Introduction Through dancing, people encode their understanding of the music into body movement. Research has shown that this body engagement has a component of temporal synchronization but also becomes overt in the spatial deployment of dance figures [1-5]. Through dancing, dancers establish specific spatiotemporal patterns (i.e., dance figures) in synchrony with the music. Moreover, as Brown [1] points out, dances are modular in organization, meaning that the complex spatiotemporal patterns can be segmented into smaller units, called gestures [6]. The beat pattern presented in the music functions thereby as an elementary structuring element. As such, an important aspect of learning to dance is learning how to perform these basic gestures in response to the music and how to combine these gestures to further develop complex dance sequences.
* Correspondence: [email protected] IPEM, Department of Musicology, Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
The aim of this article is to introduce a computational platform, entitled “Dance-the-Music”, that can be used in dance education to explore and learn the basics of dance figures. A special focus thereby lays on the spatial deployment of dance gestures, like footstep displacement patterns, body rotation, etc. The platform facilitates to train basic step models from sequentially repeated dance figures performed by a dance teacher. The models can be stored together with the corresponding music in audiovisual databases. The contents of these databases, the teachers’ models, are then used (1) to give instructions to dance novices on how to perform the specific dance gestures (cf., dynamic dance notation), and (2) to recognize the quality of stud
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