Participatory Design Research Methodologies: a Case Study in Dancer Sonification

Given that embodied interaction is widespread in HumanComputer Interaction, interests on the importance of body movements and emotions are gradually increasing. The present paper describes our process of designing and testing a dancer sonification system using a participatory design research methodology. The end goal of the dancer sonification project is to have dancers generate aesthetically pleasing music in realtime based on their dance gestures, instead of dancing to prerecorded music. The generated music should reflect both the kinetic activities and affective contents of the dancer’s movement. To accomplish these goals, expert dancers and musicians were recruited as domain experts in affective gesture and auditory communication. Much of the dancer sonification literature focuses exclusively on describing the final performance piece or the techniques used to process motion data into auditory control parameters. This paper focuses on the methods we used to identify, select, and test the most appropriate motion to sound mappings for a dancer sonification system.