Analysis of the qualities of human movement in individual action

The project was organized as a preliminary study for Use Case #1 of the Horizon 2020 Research Project “Dance in the Dark” (H2020 ICT Project n.645553 - http://dance.dibris.unige.it). The main objective of the DANCE project is to study and develop novel techniques and algorithms for the automated measuring of non-verbal bodily expression and the emotional qualities conveyed by human movement, in order to enable the perception of nonverbal artistic whole-body experiences to visual impaired people. In the framework of the eNTERFACE ’15 Workshop we investigated methods for analyzing human movements in terms of expressive qualities. When analyzing an individual action we were mainly concentrating on the quality of motion and on elements suggesting different emotions. We developed a system to automatically extract several movement features and transfer them to the auditory domain through interactive sonification. We performed an experiment with 26 participants and collected a dataset made of video and audio recordings plus accelerometer data. Finally, we performed a perception study through questionnaires, in order to evaluate and validate the system. As real time application of our system we developed a game named ”Move in the Dark”, which has been presented in the Mundaneum Museum of Mons, Belgium and Festival della Scienza, Genova, Italy (27 November 2015).