Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!psuvax1!burdvax!sdcrdcf!trwrb!aero!venera.isi.edu!smoliar From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Human-human communication Message-ID: <5689@venera.isi.edu> Date: 11 Jun 88 15:01:13 GMT References: <32403@linus.UUCP> <238@proxftl.UUCP> <1315@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <905@papaya.bbn.com> Sender: news@venera.isi.edu Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar) Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute Lines: 73 In article <905@papaya.bbn.com> barr@pineapple.bbn.com (Hunter Barr) writes: > >Now I must "get pedantic," by saying that body movement *is* >describable. As for part a), you are correct that someone other than >the author must understand it, otherwise we do not have communication. >But you ignore the existance of useful dance notations. I don't know >much about dance notation, and I am sure there is much lacking in it-- >probably standardization for one thing. But the lack of a universally >intelligable *spoken* language does not make human speech fail the >"usefulness" test. Mandarin Chinese is an even bigger problem with >adults than dance notation! If one learned a common dance notation >from childhood, it would be every bit as useful as the Chinese >language. Having just said my piece about colors, Hunter, I do not want you to get the idea that I'm picking on you; but I have to come to Gilbert Cockton's defense here. (Surprised, Gilbert?) You see, I spent several years working with a variety of different dance notations. A summary of much of my work was published in COMPUTING SURVEYS in an article I wrote with Norman Badler. Let me try to straighten out a few points here. First of all, NO dance notation provides sufficient information for the exact reproduction of a movement. Like all notations, dance notation involves introducing simplifying abstractions. Some notations are basically iconographic . . . simplified images of positions are key points in time drawn with the assumption that the brain can fill in the "between" stuff. Others attempt to describe trajectories of flexion at the major joints. However, no notation has been able to communicate some of the most fundamental information about body comportment which is vital in reproducing any movement pattern, be it for dance, athletics, or anything else. The notation I know best is Labanotation, having worked directly with the Dance Notation Bureau for a couple of years. Here are a few interesting things that I learned there: 1. Most dancers do not read Labanotation. If a dance company wants to reconstruct a work from a notated score, they bring in a notator to interpret the score for them. 2. When a notator is interpreting a score, it is usually very valuable to know WHO recorded the score. If you know who wrote the notation, you can usually make some assumptions about how most of those abstractions can be fleshed out into "real" movement. If you don't know who the notator was, you damned well better know the style of the choreographer whose work is being reconstructed! In other words, without some general mental image of "what things are supposed to look like," the notation will not do you very much good. In other words, for all its merits, dance notation is basically a sophisticated form of a memory aid with some attempt at standardization. If you wanted to compare it to music notation, today's notation of music would be a poor analogy. For some dance notations, the analogy would best fit the diacritical marks which indicate the proper incantation of Hebrew religious texts. Labanotation, on the other hand, would probably find its analogy somewhere in the 14th century attempts at notating polyphony. Regarding the learning of dance notation from childhood, there used to be (and perhaps still are . . . Gilbert?) programs in the United Kingdom which teach dance from a very early age. Some of these programs have incorporated the use of dance notation from the beginning. Since these programs have been around since the fifties, I would have thought that by now we would be seeing notation-literate dancers, at least in London. I have encountered no evidence that this is the case, nor does it appear that notation is a major element in the operation of many large-scale dance companies. Ultimately, I tend to agree with Gilbert that the problem is not in the notation but in what is trying to be communicated. Video is as valuable in reconstructing dances as it is in gymnastics, but there is still no substitute for "shaping" bodies. What Gilbert calls "memory positions" I have always called "muscular memory;" and I'm afraid there is no substitute for physical experience when it comes to acquiring it.