CO/DA: Live-Coding Movement-Sound Interactions for Dance Improvisation

We present a performance-led inquiry that involved a live coder programming movement-based interactive sound and two dance improvisers. During two years of collaboration, we developed a joint improvisation practice where the interactions between the dancers’ movement and the sound feedback are programmed on the fly through live coding and movement sensing. To that end, we designed a new live coding environment called CO/DA that facilitates the real-time manipulation of continuous streams of the dancers’ motion data for interactive sound synthesis. Through an autoethnographic inquiry, we describe our practice of sound and movement improvisation where live coding dynamically changes how the dancers’ movements generate sound, which in turn influences the dancers’ improvisation. We then discuss the value, potential and challenges of our dance/code improvisation practice, along with its implications as a design method.

Honnorable Mention