Choreographed for You

Choreography is all about finding the right match between human movement and music. I had always figured it wasn’t the music as a whole that must match people’s movement so much as it was just the rhythm and beat . Get the music’s bangs in line with the people’s bangs–that’s all choreographers needed to care about. But I now realize there’s a great deal more to it. A lot of what matters in good choreography is not the rhythm and beat at all. The melodic contour matters, too, and so does the loudness. (To all you choreographers who already know this, please bear with me!)

Why should musical qualities beyond rhythm and beat matter to choreography? Because there are sound qualities beyond our intrinsic banging gangly sounds that also matter for sensing human movers. For example, suppose you and I are waiting for an approaching train, but you are 100 yards farther up the tracks (toward the approaching train) than I am. You and I will hear the same train “gait” sounds–the chugs, the rhythmic clattering of steel, and so on–but you will hear the train’s pitch fall (due to the Doppler effect) before I hear it fall. Now imagine that I am wearing headphones connected to a microphone on your lapel, so that at my position along the tracks I am listening to the sounds you are hearing at your position along the tracks. The intrinsic gait sounds of the train would be choreographed appropriately with my visual perception of the train, because those gait sounds don’t depend on the location of the listener. But my headphone experience of the pitch and loudness contours would no longer fit my visual experience. The train’s pitch now begins falling too early, and will already approach its lowest going‑away‑from‑me pitch before the train even reaches me. The train’s loudness is also now incorrect, reaching its peak when the train is still 100 yards from reaching me. This would be a deeply ecologically incoherent audiovisual experience; the auditory stream from the headphones would not be choreographed with the train’s visible movements, even though the temporal properties–the beat and rhythm–of the train’s trangly bangings are just as they should be.

Real‑world choreography pays attention to pitch and loudness contours as well as gait sounds; and, crucially, which pitch and loudness contour matches a movement depends on where the listener is. Choreography for pitch and loudness contours is listener‑centric.

The implication for musical choreography is this: in matching music to movement, the choreographer must make sure that the view point is the same point in space as the listening point. Good choreography must not merely “know its audience,” but know where they are. Music choreographed for you , where you’re sitting, may not be music choreographed for me , where I’m sitting. In television, choreographers play to the camera’s position. If movers are seen in a video to veer toward the camera, melody’s pitch must rise to fit the video, for example. In live shows, choreographers play to the audience, although this gets increasingly difficult the more widely the audience is distributed around the stage. (This is one of many reasons why most Super Bowl halftime shows suck.)

Whereas our discussion so far has concerned rhythm and beat, which do not depend on the listener’s position, the upcoming sections concern pitch and loudness, each of which depends crucially on the location of the listener. Music with only a beat and a rhythm is a story of human behavior, but without any particular viewpoint. In contrast, music with pitch and loudness modulations puts the listener at a fixed viewpoint (or listening point) in the story, as the fictional mover changes direction and proximity to the listener. These are the mover’s kinematics, and the rest of this chapter examines how music tells stories about the kinematics.