Playing the Body: Making Music through Various Body Movements

Abstract

We explore a bodily interaction as a creative experience to support musical expression. This paper discusses an interactive system---Playing the Body---that supports the creative activity of composing music by incorporating large body movements in space. In order to encourage the user to form an overall image of the melody in the early stages of composition, the proposed system supports interaction using the whole body to generate a melody. Then, after going through a trial-and-error stage, it provides a refinement stage that encourages introspection, refining the melody to make the sound more consistent with the ideal image. This is done by supporting interaction using the hands and arms, which have a greater degree of freedom. In a pilot study, positive responses were obtained regarding the creation of a melody using the whole body. Future work includes improving the use of the hands and arms to refine the melody.