Dance Moves In on Composer’s Role : CalArts Student Puts Some Muscle Behind Music by Means of a Computer

An arm extends, and tympanies thunder.

A knee bends, and sirens call.

Dancers twirl across the stage, and they are making the music. Shiny metal strips on their elbows and knees detect movement. These are connected to small transmitters on the performers’ waists, which send signals of this movement to a nearby computer. The computer plays electronic synthesizers.

“The music is being played by the dancers,” said Mark Coniglio, who put together the technology for this new art. “The music doesn’t sound different, but there’s a drama to it. It becomes dynamic.”

Coniglio has worked for more than two years to develop his “MidiDancer,” a means of freeing dancers from the constraints of written scores and taped music. Tonight, at CalArts in Valencia, the 28-year-old composition student will unveil his contraption with a quartet dance.

The MidiDancer will climax a multidisciplinary concert, which will be performed again Saturday and Sunday nights.

“We’re all nervous. Completely nervous,” said Dawn Stoppiello, a CalArts student who will dance in the MidiDancer piece that she helped choreograph. “It’s something new.”

Coniglio became involved in this sort of work because of a boyhood fascination with computers and music. At CalArts, he combined these two loves while studying under electronic music composer Morton Subotnick.

Coniglio calls his invention MidiDancer because it makes use of a machine called a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), which allows a Macintosh computer to play synthesizers. The synthesizers can reproduce virtually any sound from violin to oboe to human voice.

The MIDI part was easy. You can buy those in music stores. The “Dancer” part was tough. Coniglio had to find a way to transform human movement into electronic impulses that would make sense to a computer.

MidiDancer begins with the sensors, which Coniglio fashioned from metal and wire. Affixed to knees and elbows, they can detect the angle that the joint is bent and how quickly this movement is performed.

Coniglio wrote a computer program that turns these mathematical measurements of movement into music.

In preparation for a performance, Coniglio types in commands that tell his Macintosh to play a certain musical note or chord if, say, one of the dancers bends her elbow. Should another dancer bend his knee, that will trigger a snippet of melody.

Finally came the dilemma of joining sensor to computer. For this task, Coniglio delved into the technology of a toy store.

First he considered using the transmitters from walkie-talkies. But on a student’s budget, that option was too costly. Then he looked into using the electronics from a Mr. Microphone toy, but ruled that out.

Radio-controlled cars provided a solution. The $45 transmitters for these toys are small and effective. He already had the computer, the MIDI and synthesizers--for another $600, the device was complete.

“When Mark talks about all his technology, it’s like a foreign language to me,” said Stoppiello, an Ahmanson scholar. “But the first time you put one of these things on your elbow and straighten your arm and it makes a sound . . . wow! It’s like ultimate artistic power.”

With MidiDancer, Coniglio’s dancers can bend their legs quickly to produce a rapid-fire beat, slowly to produce a soft tone. They might, for instance, raise their right arms three times to switch their “trigger” from cello to French horn.

“It’s really an odd sensation to hear how your body moves,” said Ilaan Egeland, who choreographed with Stoppiello and who will also dance this weekend. “We can really be aware of the other dancers because we don’t have to constantly dance to an exact beat. I can play off somebody and create more of a character. I can have more of an internal timing.”

But with this control comes risk.

“From night to night, the way the dancers move is always going to change,” Coniglio said. “That element of chance is exciting.”

And rehearsals this week have been plenty exciting as Coniglio scurries to clear up the kinks in his machine and the dancers adapt to being masters of their own tempo.

But, once perfected, the MidiDancer could allow for absolutely improvisational performances. Coniglio and others are dreaming of new kinds of dance, ones in which the performers won’t know what sound they’ll make by moving in this way or that.

“It’s one of those things where the technology could keep going and going,” said Cristyne Lawson, dean of CalArts’ dance school. “You could possibly do anything with it.”