Sonification of movement qualities – a case study on fluidity

The EU H2020 ICT Project DANCE investigates how affective and social qualities of human full-body movements can be expressed, represented, and analysed by sound and music performance. In this paper we focus on one of the candidate movement qualities: Fluidity. An algorithm to detect Fluidity in full-body movement, and a model of interactive sonification to convey Fluidity through the auditory channel are presented. We developed a set of different sonifications: some follows the proposed sonification model, and others are based on different, in some cases opposite, rules. Our hypothesis is that our proposed sonification model is the most effective in communicating Fluidity. To confirm the hypothesis, we developed a serious game and performed an experiment with 22 participants at MOCO 2016 conference. Results suggest that the sonifications following our proposed model are the most effective in conveying Fluidity.