Do we dance with music or does music make us dance?

Abstract

Background: Electronic Dance Music (EDM) is a genre created to be played at parties and danced by a large audience. Some of its rhythmic features are the strong salience of the main, regular beat (usually between 120-150 bpm), and the looped formal patterns in multiples of four (beats, measures, sections) (Butler, 2003). Embodied music cognition understands the synchronization of human movements and musical features as music-induced movements, both in everyday life listening and in dance contexts, including EDM dance (Burger & Toiviainen, 2020). It was shown that all feet movements of the audience at EDM parties are organized in only 2 motion patterns, metrically aligned with musical meter (Marchiano & Martínez, 2019). Based on that previous work, we propose to extend the analysis to the audience arms’ motion patterns and their synchronization with metrical structure of music. Because EDM parties are highly cultural contexts, we also expect to find non-alignments with music and shared motion patterns that shows some cultural constrains (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999). Aims: We aim to describe and identify arm’s motion patterns, and analyze their alignment with metrical structure of music.