Dance as Discovery

How can dance be used to push the boundaries of scientific knowledge? I began my work on this question after being exposed to the work of Stanford’s Center for the Computational Research for Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). At CCRMA, a pool of successful composers and sound engineers have created a strong case for how music can be used to make scientific discoveries. By developing tools that are being adopted by healthcare professionals, .., and more the CCRMA scientists have developed ways to codify the human response to sound and develop products that are adding to scientific practice.

By drawing upon specialties such as psychoacoustics and sound design, CCRMA scientists ...

Dance has a history of being used to address mental and physical ailments and make athletes more graceful through Dance Movement Therapy and ... respectively. However, the degree to which Dance Movement Therapy affects patient well-being has not been proven through clinical trials and ..., though having many supporters in professional sport communities that arise from stress and numerous athletes use ballet as a way to train their muscles to ...; however, dance has not had such a clear conversion into functional use. Through the work herein some fundamental relationships between the functionalization of music and dance are revealed.

By applying sonification, the process of mapping numbers to sounds, to measurements of neural activity and breathing patterns Professors such as Chris Chafe and Jonathan Berger showed how medicine and data analysis and could benefit from music in a new way. Seeing their success left me wanting to do the same with dance.

I tried to answer the question of how dance could be used as a platform for discovery by Using Sonification as a support and focusing on how dance could be used as an analytical tool. Many dancers and choreographers have tackled this question in their own way. Renowned choreographers such as William Forseythe, Jose Limon, and ... have approached dance as a ... method of ... while contemporary artists such as Aleta Hayes and Katherine Hawthorne applied collaboration and rigour to their design processes.

Modern day projects such as Dance Your PhD have shown how the question of what dance is can lead to different interpretations and views of how dance can be used to involve more people in scientific discussion; however, I wanted to approach dance as a pure art form rather than as a fun way for people to entertain. That led me to a series of improvisations that led me down a path of interviews and