[HN Gopher] A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social...
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A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)
Author : nullsub
Score : 68 points
Date : 2024-06-20 04:53 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (zacksdancelab.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (zacksdancelab.com)
| vikhik wrote:
| I've often considered the same things (Salsa), and it's
| interesting to see where he's going with it!
| fatcow wrote:
| https://furius.ca/salsa-book/ is a previous attempt!
| seer wrote:
| Hah same - especially in the beginning - all the moves looked
| like programming functions - inputs and outputs, state
| mutations etc.
|
| Thing is, the more I learned the more I started to use
| internally consistent vocabulary, so I no longer needed
| analogs, but would construct new moves from older simpler ones.
|
| I don't think though that this article captures the complexity
| of of social dance, maybe that's why its so universally fun?
| Its not just arms, legs and body positions - there is weight
| transfer, musicality, disparity between partner's skill levels,
| let alone all other dancers around you that you need to track
| so as not to have an accident. And thats before you start
| adding shines, styling and body movement.
|
| There _is_ an underlying system of course - every move has a
| finite possible exits, if you dance "by the rules" but dance
| evolution is all about breaking those rules. And if you're at
| that level, you can start mixing other dances into your move
| set ... Its all incredibly hard to reason about.
|
| Maybe thats why the gold standard is just to record your
| lessons and get back to them when you want to.
| chrisjj wrote:
| Just me, or is this ornithology for birds?
| vlz wrote:
| I see this as an almost scientific/scholarly exercise in
| modeling. While the author seems not to start with any intent
| to "do science" he or she tries to capture a concrete
| phenomenon abstractly in order to study it more closely, which
| is arguably at the heart of science or at least some of the
| sciences.
|
| The post is "almost" scholarly because it does not try to look
| into what others did before or currently, eg. prior attempts at
| notation of dance. I would be very surprised if there weren't
| any. Modeling cultural practices is also somewhat of a hot
| topic in the so called "Digital humanities" for what that is
| worth. A quick search for example brought up this article which
| talks about Dance Studies and attempts at digitization:
|
| https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/digital-research-in-dan...
|
| Anyways "ornithology for birds" is pretty fitting as this seems
| to just be anthropology for humans.
| chrisjj wrote:
| Indeed. Where it goes wrong is the notion it will help people
| learn how to dance.
| geewee wrote:
| I could see stuff like this helping advanced dancers come
| up with new stuff or perhaps help some instructors.
| chrisjj wrote:
| Indeed invaluable to help dance instructors come up with
| stuff to sell. Because its so well suited to
| incomprehensibility e.g. this famous example
| https://www.tangomovimentoterapia.com/wp-
| content/uploads/201...
| virtualritz wrote:
| This partly happened in tango in the 90's, when Gustavo Naveira,
| Chicho Frumboli and Fabian Salas came together to create a
| structural and kinesiologica base for something that previously
| existed more as "an intuition".
|
| For each basic configuration of leader and follower and their
| bodies they looked at all permutations.
|
| Then they constrained it first to the subset of those that are
| possible to do at all, kinesiologically.
|
| Then further to the subset of those that could be danced with
| reasonable comfort.
|
| And finally the subset of those that are easy enough to be taught
| to students and would work on a crowded social dancefloor.
|
| None of this was done with the help of computers.
|
| The most systemic documentation of this is possibly Mauricio
| Castro's book "Tango -- the structure of the dance".
|
| But lately a lot of new books were published on tango technique;
| I may be out of the loop.
|
| A friend of mine who's also a tango professional is currently
| looking into the feasibility of doing a PhD thesis on this topic.
|
| He wants to use ML to spit spit out the full motion tree of
| tango.
|
| Both to be able to document it automatically, i.e. using
| generated 3D animations, as well as to discover new combinations
| the manual approach used by Naveira, Frumboli and Salas, over a
| quarter century ago, will have missed.
| fzeindl wrote:
| I have had the same idea about martial arts. Not sure it is
| possible. In dancing you have at least some symmetric patterns
| and rhythm, in martial arts you have even more stances,
| rotation around more axes and arrhythmic moves.
|
| good dancing like good fighting isn't mechanical either, it is
| good because it relies on little imperfections. Just like MIDI
| files cannot replace a concert pianist.
|
| In the end I think motion capture of extremities along with
| some easing of paths and compression of point-clouds (think
| bezier curves) might be more worthwhile than a notation.
| viraptor wrote:
| > in martial arts you have even more stances, rotation around
| more axes and arrhythmic moves.
|
| I wonder how true this is. Specifically I think you could
| simplify the moves into steps with "who hits who" states. You
| could normalise out the rhythm, following the "everything's
| in 4/4 if you don't count like a nerd" idea.
|
| So you'd end up with just the key frames of either
| contacts/impact or change of the movement direction. Would
| martial arts really have even more variety here?
| fzeindl wrote:
| > Would martial arts really have even more variety here?
|
| It depends, but yes. Martial arts is not just boxing. Take
| the following choreography from one style of Pencak silat:
|
| https://youtu.be/8H0x1AKlpM4?si=QJLNffTUozn9kCf9
| hobs wrote:
| Time to load up toribash
| weinzierl wrote:
| This reminds me a bit of Siteswap notation for Juggling.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap
| damhsa wrote:
| the supposed 15 hand holds is a little misleading as it doesn't
| account for holds where a hand is placed on the body, which is
| important to many dancing traditions, such as the mirror image
| polka hold, with the man's left arm stretched to his left holding
| his girl's right hand, and his right on her body, or the
| rotationally symmetric ceilidh hold, where both partners hold
| left hands, and pass their right hand over and through the hold
| to grasp their partner's left side, inside of their left arm. the
| statement needs a big caveat so it is clear that it does not
| accurately describe all real dance holds.
| geewee wrote:
| Nor does it capture that you might be holding your hands in
| different ways, such as which side is rotated up.
| lostemptations5 wrote:
| I don't know. This is ok if it's helpful, but reminds me of why I
| quit playing chess: the mystery was lost.
|
| As I got more into chess and with the advancement of chess
| computers and championships, I felt there was little creativity
| left to have fun with the game.
|
| So for dancing, it's literally meant to be "danced".
|
| Of course you can figure out all the combinations and so on, but
| being overly analytical about it removes -- for me -- the entire
| reason to do it : to escape the intellectual world and do
| something kinesthetic.
|
| I understand I am probably an outlier here on HN. :)
| bsder wrote:
| > why I quit playing chess: the mystery was lost.
|
| Well, the problem is that with all the online resources, you
| _quickly_ learn that chess is more about blunder avoidance than
| any brilliant, dynamic scheme.
|
| That takes a lot of the fun out of chess.
| abernard1 wrote:
| I enjoy the attempt to analyze the dancing (really choreography).
| But I'm surprised that in this new world of LLM hype not one word
| in there was dedicated to what dance really is: a language.
|
| Dance is a physical, kinesthetic language.
|
| And to riff on some of the posters, it's this expression and
| communication between the dancers that makes dancing worth
| dancing. There's also the social communication between the group,
| cultural "dialects" and "accents" (on1 vs on2, stylings, etc.)
|
| I began dancing when I realized there was an entire spectrum of
| the senses closed off to me from overthinking. Besides the
| specifics of "body language," good dancers can convey intense
| amounts of emotion. I met someone who could "talk" to me for
| hours and she never needed to say a word. While the poster
| attempts to represent dancing in terms of a symbolic language,
| I'd recommend anyone interested in dance to also try the
| opposite: realize the physicality _is_ the language and medium of
| expression. It 's more fun, and I promise you your style of
| thinking will enlarge and grow.
| matheist wrote:
| Agree. I think the approach in TFA is like trying to analyze,
| say, improv comedy via a context-free grammar for English.
| There might be something there, in the syntax, but it misses a
| huge amount of semantics and paralanguage.
| abernard1 wrote:
| Yeah. While I'm sympathetic to the attempt to formalize the
| representation, there's a psychology to this that a lot of
| people in tech seem to miss when I see them dancing.
|
| The reasoning goes: "if I understand and represent this
| choreography properly, I will be better at the activity of
| dance." Dancing, for them, is the end result of understanding
| a representation and then doing it.
|
| But the psychological shift is "if I understand my emotions
| and body properly, I will be able to _use_ the representation
| of dance to convey that. " While dance obviously needs a
| backing vocabulary of basics and moves, great dancers
| accidentally come up with better dance moves because their
| body mechanics combined with the dance's structure,
| musicality, and emotion constrain what they do. They--and I'm
| going to use this word intentionally-- _literally_ think and
| communicate through dancing. To use your phrasing, the
| "semantic" meaning of the dance is their emotions: the actual
| activity of dance is simply the representational outlet for
| that.
|
| When you're with a good dancer, your brain shuts off but
| you're still stuck within the aforementioned set of
| constraints. And that's when the magic happens. That's when
| you actually start speaking. That's when your improvised move
| is the only way you could have possibly said what you wanted
| to say.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Musical and Mathematical Design of Square Dance Singing Calls
| Part 1 - Guy L. Steele Jr.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_TqFOyYYmc
|
| Guy L. Steele Jr.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele_Jr.
| geewee wrote:
| Having danced for around a decade, I would say the hand
| positioning example is a bit reductive. The most obvious example
| is that there's only one variant of "both hands crossed over" -
| while it's true that the hands might only fit together one way,
| the things you can do with the hands depending on what arm is on
| top varies significantly.
|
| Having said that I'm pretty excited about the topic and what the
| author can do with it.
| viraptor wrote:
| It is, but also it's a helpful simplification, I believe. It's
| kind of like a cup and a ring being topologically equivalent.
| Helps you talk about some generic thing without overloading
| with details.
|
| Then there are many more layers on top: palms facing
| up/down/side, cupped or pressed against, which part of the
| hand/arm/body are you holding, which one's on top, compression
| or stretch, at what height, etc.
| peanut-walrus wrote:
| Could someone explain what a hammerlock is and why it is
| significant? Searching just said it's a type of joint lock in
| wrestling which doesn't make sense to me in this context.
|
| Then again, I have never danced.
| viraptor wrote:
| You can look for Bachata hammerlock specifically
| https://www.quicksteps.com.au/dance-lesson-videos/bachata/le...
|
| It's interesting, because you have to do something active about
| it. If you move into hammerlock, you can't continue moving the
| same way anymore, so you have to decide on some combination of
| releasing hands, rotating in the other direction, staying and
| playing in that position, etc.
| rho138 wrote:
| I love how the page renders and then shits the bed when webgl is
| disabled.
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