Future applications
This theoretical background combining the precision of motion capture technologies together with the flexibility and proven artistic potential of the Laban technique is going to be at the base of a following study focusing on movements during organ playing. This instrument has never been explored in this sense but can be extremely interesting because of the physical demands that it presents, with all limbs of the player being involved in the sound production, as well as the often present logistical limitation of the audience not being able to see the performer, and therefore "missing out" on the expressive material coming from body movements that the literature describes as possibly enhancing the performer-audience communication. Having collected information about my own (expressive) movements whilst playing and having linked them to the musical vitality, the translation into Laban parameters is going to be used to recreate such movements in the context of a dance choreography, in an attempt to amplify their expressive and communicative power and showing a possible application of embodied knowledge in an artistic field.
The need of a detailed analysis of my movements whilst playing, together with the one of being able to communicate with some dancers in order to create the choreography, explain the choice of combining the complexity of the EyesWeb platform with the flexibility of the Laban Technique, which was also chosen because of the dancers’ familiarity with this language. The deepened knowledge on music and movement that I could acquire through the present work has led me to design my experiment, as presented in the following scheme.
Cameras will be placed in order to capture both a side and above view of myself, providing a three-dimensional view of the movements. The piece(s) are going to be played entirely, preserving the ecological conditions of the performance.
The piece(s) will be analyzed in order to identify some underlying sections, defined both by their structural significance, as well as my own perception of their vitality contours.
Having collected the significant fragments of the performance, the corresponding videos are going to be analyzed using the EyesWeb platform, in order to extract the movement characteristics described in the various libraries.
The association between the movements characteristics extracted through the EyesWeb platform and the vitality ratings of the same musical fragments is going to be studied and quantified by means of a statistical regression.
The quantified relationships between movement and vitality are going to be associated to the related Laban parameters, in order to create a vocabulary that allows to translate the indended expression into the corresponding (qualities of) body movements. This vocabulary can also be used in future projects, as a tool that allows the embodiement of one's musical ideas into physical movement.