TLDR alert…
[quote]Are these Laban terms used in the music world or is it currently mostly used for dance?
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I’ve not seem them used in the music world, except in one instance coming across them as a way to generate ideas for improvising accompaniments for dance classes. Often a dance class will have a hired musician to provide a beat, and the musician will do this via improvisation.
[quote]Are the terms abstractions for dancers to reason about the music they dance to or are there also composers that use these terms (and speak them) when they compose?
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Laban notation is mostly used by choreographers (but interestingly, has been picked up by acting schools as a way to teach the ability to move from one emotional state to another), but not even all choreographers use it by any means. But I imagine that to the extent words are used (mostly dance is communicated by demonstration), there would be a tendency to gravitate towards this conceptual framework. I haven’t explored much in dance theory besides Laban. In the music world, these terms are NOT generally formally used or analysed, with a few exceptions here and there.
[quote]I have heard musicians talk about “tension”, “melody movement”, “intensity”, and the connection between a melody and a story. Musicians also talk about the important balance between structure and variation, which seems to be important in all creative areas.
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Absolutely!
It’s really hard for me not to go off the deep end here. If you look at most musical terms, they are metaphors that map mere vibrations in the air to physical space and body sensation. There are musical theorists (Kerman, McClary) that are happy to make use of mappings to the physical & emotional world in their analysis, and others like Stravinsky as a classic example of those who say that music is purely abstract form. Suzanne Langer was important in providing a philosophical link, and I think the work on the metaphorical basis of language by G. Lakoff is starting to find some music theorists that are directly applying his linguistic theories to music.
But that doesn’t mean some clever programmers have to wait for these folks to sort all this stuff out in order to apply it to game programming.
Why not do an angular velocity analysis of a melodic line? Lay out the X in time and the Y via scale steps (or log scale of pitch). From this one can infer whether the melody is acting “as if” it is an object behaving in a physical space or not. Our minds automatically try to map observed behavior and action to intention, it is how we are built. So, constrain the building of the melodic motion to create shapes that fit the game state.
Overlay this with another map of dissonance/consonance to the current tone center, and you have degrees of restfulness. Some melodies stay low near the tone centers, others tend to come to resting points only on relatively dissonant tones, creating a sense of relative instability or restlessness. Game state can determine which way to tend.
Composing is a bit like being a mime. You create illusions. For example, a melodic line (that has indeed established that it is a line by behaving in a line-like way, rather than a random way) first has to create the space, perhaps a wall, by bumping into it (think of a melody that bounces off of a certain note rather than progressing beyond it) and then with a more vigorous approach bursts past that “barrier.” Or, using our Laban Effort scales tranlated to transformational methods of the motivic material…vary the approach to that barrier in a game-appropriate way.
I would love to collaborate on laying out some of these ideas into code form. It’s an ambitious project, and there’s a lot of virgin territory here, though I think there are already some pretty sophisticated programs that are able to identify the composer of a composition by purely analytical methods, or even generate new compositions “in the style of.”
