Editorial: A Visual Presentation Of Interpreting Musicality

All dancers yearn to express the music with their bodies. It’s the heart of our soul and the core of our being when we move. But how do we embrace technology to deepen our understanding of the music? If musicality is defined as the extent to which a dancer illustrates the music through movement, we honestly have to embrace the fact that some dancers are more skilled at this than others. There are some dancers who naturally hear the music while others are close to tone deaf either by inexperience or circumstances. So is there a visual way to illustrate music and in turn, musicality?

Do you remember the screensavers that Windows Media Player would display when you played your favorite songs? You’d see colorful patterns and trails radiating across a black screen, informed by the pulsing beat. Let’s imagine how this visual display could be taken to a higher level to help dancers with their musicality. Combining holographic technology and possibly augmented reality, what if there was a device that street dancers could wear to help them see visual patterns in a musical track? This could be a small visor or a projected layer in front of the dancer’s face that tracks changes in the music. This kind of setup could be used as a teaching aid to help dancers hone in their musicality. It wouldn’t be intended as a featured requirement for their performance.

It’s been told that master chess players can see color patterns on the board for their upcoming moves. Could that be an effective teaching tool for dancers or would we be veering to close to repetitive, button-pushing like in Guitar Hero and Dance, Dance Revolution? The details for such an invention would need to be worked out. But why not embrace a visual approach to teaching musicality? Many of today’s youngest street dancers struggle with understanding the music if they haven’t been taught properly or aren’t naturally gifted in this area. Technology, in its best educational intentions, can be embraced to enhance our quality of life as well as our appreciation of our bodies.