A Cross-modal Heuristic for Periodic Pattern Analysis of Samba Music and Dance

Abstract

Samba delimits a privileged cultural territory, which is populated by a diverse set of dance and musical expressions. Although several authors have stressed the fact that music and dance are intrinsically coupled in samba culture, there is a lack of proper methods that allow the description of this relationship in terms of musical patterns and body movement. In this study, we develop a method to unravel this relationship, using a computational heuristics that provides an analysis framework to find periodic patterns connected with metre in dance and music. The method is applied to a limited universe of samba dances and music, which is used to illustrate the usefulness of the approach. In particular, we show that an interesting coupling can be observed between dance and music at the metrical level. The results allow us to make the description of shared structures, such as synchronized patterns and spatial gestures, under the common framework of metre. Evidence for the enactment hypothesis is revealed by the contrast between binary tendencies in dance patterns and polymetric ambiguity in music. It is likely that the musical ambiguity of samba forms is a basis for the active engagement of dancers in re-enactment processes, thus providing a framework for embodied meaningformation

Basic Gestures as Spatiotemporal Reference Frames for Repetitive Dance/Music Patterns in Samba and Charleston

“…the becking curves represent the shapes of basic gestures, of which the period corresponds to the period of the metric grid (horizontal). Note that the becking curves are not always closed, which is due to the method used in Naveda and Leman (2009). teaching. She performed dances in basic Charleston style.…”

“…Using this analysis approach, Naveda and Leman (2009) found evidence that (binary) periodicities in the gestures of the samba dancer may disambiguate the metrical ambiguity (binary versus ternary groupings of the beat) in samba music. The process of corporealbased disambiguation can thereby be seen as a meaning formation process that is rooted in the deployment of the body, rather than by mere mental processing of sonic structures (Leman, 2007;Phillips-Silver & Trainor, 2007).…”

“…He focused on the speed of walking in relation to the musical tempo (i.e., beats per second). In a series of studies on samba dance and music (Naveda & Leman, 2008a, 2008b, this concept of basic gesture was further developed and was related to the hierarchical structure of musical meter. The latter consists of multiples and divisions of the beat period.…”

“…In practice, each metrical unit (i.e., the beat, and its multiples and divisions) has a duration, or time period, which defines a sieve (a small time window in the vicinity of that time period), through which we look at the repetitive dance pattern in order to apply the periodicity transform. The period (and corresponding shape) of the repetitive dance pattern is extracted using the Any-Route heuristic (Naveda & Leman, 2009), which uses a strategy in which each sievebased search starts from the original signal. Alternatively, one could use a heuristic where the most prominent period is first extracted from the signal, and less prominent periods are subsequently extracted from the residues of that signal (as in the Best-Route heuristic in Naveda & Leman, 2009).…”

Investigating Periodic Body Motions as a Tacit Reference Structure in Norwegian Telespringar Performance

“…Dance has been categorized as sound-accompanying motions (Jensenius, 2007) or described as responses to musical sound (van Dyck et al, 2013). [3] However, for music styles in which music and dance have evolved together through mutual interaction (Blom, 1981;Naveda & Leman, 2009), it has been pointed out that the musical rhythm must be understood in relation to the corresponding dance (Grau, 1983;Baily, 1985;Kubik, 1990;Mariani, 1998;Carvalho, 1999;Gerischer, 2006;Blom, 2006). It has also been suggested that rhythm patterns may be conditioned by the particular way of dancing (Bengtsson, 1974;Blom, 1981Blom, , 1993Blom, , 2006.…”