Interactive Effect of Tempo and Rhythm on the Emotional Perception of Dance Movements

Abstract

We examined the relationship of temporal parameters, tempo and rhythm, to the perceived emotion of audience from viewing a dance. This is a problem of how choreographers manipulate the temporal parameters to express the aesthetic adequately. We conducted a psychophysical categorization task to reveal the relationship between temporal parameters of dance and subjects' subjective appreciation. Our goal was to find a distinctive point of temporal parameters that affect subjects' emotional transition, from positive to negative, vice versa. Subjects categorized dance stimuli in different combinations of tempo and rhythm by performing the two-alternative forced choice task. The results found that subjective interpretation of dance was mainly affected by the tempo, not rhythm. Rhythm had much less impact on the appreciation of affective body expression.