Dance/Music digital

• Applicants: Dr. Vera Grund; Professor Dr. Andreas Münzmay
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 517032741

A central challenge of historical dance research is the ephemerality of dance as an art form. Pre-modern ballets in particular have usually survived without choreography notations. The aim of the project is therefore to develop, for the first time, an editing method with which the information of the multifaceted sources on dance - iconographic documents, musical records, drama and rhetoric schools, archival documents - can be digitally linked in a comprehensive multimodal structural model. The project's approach takes the interdisciplinarity of dance and music into account in a special way by linking four-dimensional movement analyses (spatial and temporal dimensions), visualisations and analyses of dance poses, animated gestures and dance steps with information from music, images and texts. For the technical realisation, on the one hand, the further development and adaptation of the MovEngine technology, which has already been tested as a prototype in other contexts, is central. Based on the semantics of dance notations, MovEngine, designed by dance scientist Henner Drewes, enables a formal description and four-dimensional modelling of human body movement - in contrast to the more widespread animation technologies, which do not allow a direct reference to notations. On the other hand, the research project complements the Edirom technology established for digital music editing with a module for motion representation in which the motion animations created with MovEngine can be editorially linked with music, image and text data and displayed synchronously. The multimodal digital dance/music edition developed in the project will be made available online via a project portal; at the same time, all data will be made sustainably reusable in accordance with the FAIR principles, using the services of the NFDI4Culture consortium. This concerns both the documentation of the data model and the entire XML research data (edition data) as well as the research software development with regard to MovEngine and Edirom. The edition exemplifies the possibilities of a cross-disciplinary (musicology, dance studies, digital humanities) integral research design for the new field of a dance/music edition which includes the aspect of movement. Through our digital approaches, researchers and teachers as well as dance archives and libraries will be provided with new methodological approaches to historical ballet.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria, France, USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Bruce Brown; Hubert Hazebroucq; Professorin Dr. Brigitte Marschall; Professorin Dr. Linda J. Tomko