The Language of Dance: Testing a Model of Cross-­Modal Communication in the Performing Arts

Abstract

Integration between the senses is an intrinsic part of the human condition. Many forms of artistic expression make use of these sensory alliances, for example, the expression of rhythm and melody in dance. To test whether performers can effectively communicate information from one sensory modality (hearing) into another (vision), we asked one experienced dancer to perform dance-motions to the sounds of meaningless speech, and asked junior dancers to guess which dance motions were produced in response to which sounds. The junior dancers were substantially better than chance in the guessing task, suggesting that the dance performer successfully captured acoustic information about the identity of the speech sounds in her motions. We also found that dance experience did not predict performance in the task, suggesting that sensory congruence may not be learned through practice, but may be shared among the general population. However, a subset of dancers were much better than the main group, suggesting that sensory congruence may be differentially distributed through the population. This fits well with a model in which the strength of sensory connectivity differs across the population, and in which the creative arts attracts those individuals for whom the intrinsic links between the senses are experienced more powerfully.