Formal methods in
form analysis of
Transylvanian male solo dances
Gábor Misi

Dance form analysis
1. Dance segmentation
2. Connections between structural units
3. Unit classification
4. Representative form of a unit class
5. Unit naming
6. Written dance representation
7. Mistakes of the dancer

Formal methods
Formal method: works only with notation
i.e. with written graphical signs without any meaning.
Since formal methods will be dependent upon the quality of notation,
i.e. how detailed and graphically standardized it is, notation
conventions have to be complied with before performing an analysis.

Concepts I.
semantic equality
 (identical movement)
syntactic equality
 (identical symbols)
graphic equality
 (identical drawing)

Concepts II.
Laban-pattern
matching
 - strong match
  (sign-length-identical)
 - weak match
   (sign-length tolerant)
 - very weak match
   (sign-length and pre-sign tolerant)

Concepts III.
symmetric Laban-pattern
augmented Laban-pattern
wildcard Laban-pattern
Laban logical expression

Applying formal methods 1.
 matches: the longest sequences on measure-starts avoid variants

Applying formal methods 2.
 a query, search parameters and isolated occurrences

Applying formal methods 3.
 skipped linkers, found variants, recognized mistakes

Applying formal methods 4.
 dance element instances and composed schemas

Applying formal methods 5.
 measure-start segments and their connections

Summary

Summary (cont.)
Having formal concepts and methods
could facilitate dialogue between researchers
on a higher level of objectivity
is necessary to describe algorithms
for computer-aided dance analysis.