The link between musicians and dancers is generally described as strong in many traditional musics and this holds also for Scandinavian Folk Music - spelmansmusik. Understanding the interaction of music and dance has potential for developing theories of performance strategies in artistic practice and for developing interactive systems. In this paper we investigate this link by having Swedish folk musicians perform to animations generated from motion capture recordings of dancers. The different stimuli focus on motions of selected body parts as moving white dots on a computer screen with the aim to understand how different movements can provide reliable cues for musicians. Sound recordings of fiddlers playing to the "dancing dot" were analyzed using automatic alignment to the original music performance related to the dance recordings. Interviews were conducted with musicians and comments were collected in order to shed light on strategies when playing for dancing. Results illustrate a reliable alignment to renderings showing full skeletons of dancers, and an advantage of focused displays of movements in the upper back of the dancer.

Synchronization of movement to music is a behavioural capacity that separates humans from most other species. Whereas such movements have been studied using a wide range of methods, only few studies have investigated synchronisation to real music stimuli in a cross-culturally comparative setting. The present study employs beat tracking evaluation metrics and accent histograms to analyze the differences in the ways participants from two cultural groups synchronize their tapping with either familiar or unfamiliar music stimuli. Instead of choosing two apparently remote cultural groups, we selected two groups of musicians that share cultural backgrounds, but that differ regarding the music style they specialize in. The employed method to record tapping responses in audio format facilitates a fine-grained analysis of metrical accents that emerge from the responses. The identified differences between groups are related to the metrical structures inherent to the two musical styles, such as non-isochronicity of the beat, and differences between the groups document the influence of the deep enculturation of participants to their style of expertise. Besides these findings, our study sheds light on a conceptual weakness of a common beat tracking evaluation metric, when applied to human tapping instead of machine generated beat estimations.

Some triple-beat forms in Scandinavian Folk Music are characterized by non-isochronous beat durations: asymmetric beats. Theorists of folk music have suggested that the variability of rhythmic figures and asymmetric metre are fundamental to these forms. The aim of this study is to obtain a deeper understanding of the relationship between melodic structure and asymmetric metre by analysing semi-automatically annotated performances. Our study considers archive and contemporary recordings of fiddlers' different versions of the same musical pieces: polska tunes in a local Swedish tradition. Results show that asymmetric beat patterns are consistent between performances and that they correspond with structural features of rhythmic figures, such as the note density within beats. The present study goes beyond previous work by exploring the use of a state-of-the-art automatic music notation tool in a corpus study of Swedish traditional music, and by employing statistical methods for a comparative analysis of performances across different players. 

This study presents a sonification tool – SonifyFOLK –designed for intuitive access by musicians and dancers in their sonic explorations of movements in dance performances. It is implemented as a web-based application to facilitate accessible audio parameter mapping of movement data for non-experts, and applied and evaluated with Swedish folk musicians and dancers in their exploration of sonifying dance. SonifyFOLK is based on the WebAudioXML Sonification Toolkit and is designed within a group of artists and engineers using artistic goals as drivers for the sound design. The design addresses challenges of providing an accessible interface for mapping movement data to audio parameters, managing multi-dimensional data and creating audio mapping templates for a contextually grounded sound design. The evaluation documents a diversity of sonification outcomes, reflections by participants that imply curiosity for further work on sonification, as well as the importance of the immediacy of the both visual and acoustic feedback of parameter choices. 

This exposition delves into the outcomes of a collaborative research project involving a group of Swedish folk musicians and dancers. The project employs optical motion capture (Mocap) as a tool to explore collective performance and create innovative artistic expressions by merging traditional practices with contemporary media technologies. As a musician engaged with dancers, the author investigates ways to mediate dance through the sonification and visualisation of Mocap data. The focus is on the fundamental connection between sound and movement in this performance practice, particularly showcased in the project's centrepiece, "Dancing Dots." This performance combines live music and dance with sonic and visual displays derived from Mocap studio recordings. The exposition also applies music and dance theoretical concepts in designing movement sonification, examining their relevance in an artistic context. The use of optical motion capture is contextualised as a means to convey actions through narrow streams of movement data, challenging traditional notions of performance interaction. The exposition introduces the tool SonifyFOLK for accessible sonification of folk-dance movement data, and the methods and results are grounded in a practice-based understanding of the rhythmic/metric framework of the Swedish Polska. The ultimate goal is to develop new avenues for artistic expression in Swedish folk music and dance by introducing novel interfaces between music and dance, thereby creating an immersive visual/sonic landscape that extends the traditional art form into new performance contexts.