Introduction
Music and body motion are strongly interconnected. As a drummer, I always feel strongly connected to the music with my motion in a performance, and I am fascinated by how a genre or the type of music influences body movements. During my studies in the Music, Communication and Technology study program, I had the opportunity to actively participate in the Norwegian Championship for Standstill competition in 2019 and grasp the methods of the whole process, starting from setting up the Motion Capture system to choosing the final winner of the competition. The MoCap system outputs a rich, continuous data stream with a larger number of data points. My motivation behind the thesis was to combine this data stream with sound to hear the participants’ movements. Moreover, this implementation can be used as an instrument for a “Standstill performance” and opens a new door for a sonic interaction space with human micromotion.
Research Questions
The thesis is based on one main research question and two other sub-questions. From the main research question, I wanted to broadly address exploring the connection between the body's music and involuntary motions.
During the Norwegian Championship of Standstill competition, the participants are in a forced condition to not move. And based on past studies, there is statistical evidence that music stimuli impact standing still. Apart from using a visualization method to analyze the micromotion, sonification can be used to listen to the data and find audible patterns. The main objective of this question is to find out what kind of difference can be noticed in the motion during the music stimuli is played and whether the sonification can reveal any information that was not visible in statistical studies.
- RQ1: What kind of motion patterns are audible from the standstill competition data?
- RQ2: How can spatial audio be used in the sonification of human standstill?
Building the application for sonification
The sonification is applied for data from the 2012 standstill competition data. The initial idea was to build a prototype using the 2012 standstill data and use it for the exploring rest of the database, including yearly data for the competition. According to Jensenius et al. (2017), around 100 participants joined the study, a