I want to share with you this interesting experiment I just discovered on the relationship between dance and music.
“How do movement and sound combine to produce an audiovisual aesthetics of dance? We assessed how audiovisual congruency influences continuous aesthetic and psychophysiological responses to contemporary dance. Two groups of spectators watched a recorded dance performance that included the performer’s steps, breathing and vocalizations, but no music. Dance and sound were paired either as recorded or with the original soundtrack in reverse, so that the performers’ sounds were no longer coupled to their movements. A third group watched the dance video in silence. Audiovisual incongruency was rated as more enjoyable than congruent or silent conditions. In line with mainstream conceptions of dance as movement-to-music, arbitrary relationships between sound and movement were preferred to causal relationships, in which performers produce their own soundtrack. Performed synchrony granger- caused changes in electro-dermal activity only in the incongruent condition, consistent with “aesthetic capture”. Sound structures the perception of dance movement, increasing its aesthetic appeal.”
Method Participants
Thirty-four participants, (9 male, 25 female), ranging in age from 18-51 years (M = 27.41; SD = 7.3), volunteered to take part. Musicality ranged from 48-100 (M = 74.71; SD = 17.85). on the Goldsmiths musical sophistication index v1.0 (GMSI) musicality scale. Musicality involves a wide range of musical behaviours and musical engagement such as understanding and evaluation (Müllensiefen, Gingras, Musil, & Stewart, 2014). The GMSI is a standardised instrument that provides a measure of musicality in the general population, which ranges from 18-126 with an average score of 81.58 (SD = 20.62) across the general population
(Müllensiefen, Gingras, Musil, & Stewart, 2013). Dance experience was assessed using a custom-made questionnaire, which asked people how many years dance experience they had, and how often they watched recorded dance. Fifty-three percent of participants reported previous formal dance training, but none were professional dancers, see table 1 for a demographic breakdown by experimental group. Participants volunteered in response to a Goldsmiths participation page on Facebook, and all participants signed a written consent form before taking part in the experiment. Participants were signed up to experimental groups based on their availability; allocation of experimental group to condition was randomized using numbered sealed envelopes containing randomization cards for either the congruent, incongruent, or silent conditions. The groups included 10, 14 and 10 participants in the congruent, silent, and incongruent groups respectively. All participants were included in the physiological and qualitative analyses however the tablet data of 8 participants was lost due to technical problems, leaving only 8, 10 and 8 in the congruent, silent, and incongruent groups for the enjoyment analyses.
Sources:
Howlin, Vicari, Orgs – Audiovisual Aesthetics of Sound and Movement in Contemporary Dance
