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Science Kind of Proves There's a Right Way to Dance

A new paper connects movement to sound.

Here's a thing about me and dancing: I can't really do it. It's not that I hate dancing or don't have basic coordination skills (a smidge above, optimistically), I just overthink it. I suspect that's pretty common, the need for that physical response to have some analytical basis–for it to be correct according to some criteria–rather than just goin' with the feeling or whatever. The relationship between music and movement is mysterious, which is part of the fun. A new study however purports to define this relationship (or start to), finding for the very first time a "shared dynamic structure" between the music and physical movement.

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First off, the team, led by Dartmouth's Thalia Wheatley, had to come up with some set of features that could be related between movement and sound. These were "rate, jitter (regularity of rate), direction, step size, and dissonance/visual spikiness." All could be applied to either medium. As explained in the diagram below, participants in the study had five slider bars, with which they could manipulate either sound (simple piano melody) or some image (a bouncing animated ball) according to various emotional stimuli. So, the slider bars were the same, the output medium was different.

Fifty US college students participated, with 25 in the sound group and 25 in the movement group. What they found was that the sliders remained the same across mediums. The sound group was setting its sliders for the piano melody in the same positions as the movement group was setting them for making the ball represent "happy," "sad," "angry," etc. To ensure that this result wasn't due to cultural conditioning, the study was repeated in Cambodia, with members of the culturally isolated L’ak tribe. The Dartmouth team found the same thing with the L'ak people: there is a significant correspondence between movement and sound.

Here's what they say in a new paper, which appears in PNAS today:

These data suggest two things. First, the dynamic features of emotion expression are cross-culturally universal, at least for the five emotions tested here. Second, these expressions have similar dynamic contours in both music and movement. That is, music and movement can be understood in terms of a single dynamic model that shares features common to both modalities.

This all likely has to do with the organization of the brain. "… music and movement appear to engage shared neural substrates, such as those recruited by time-keeping and sequence learning," Wheatley el al write. So take that to mean that whatever you're doing with your body while dancing, take heart that you're probably doing it right. The relationship is hardwired.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.