Synthesis of Dance Performance Based on Analyses of Human Motion and Music

Recent progress in robotics has a great potential, and we are considering to develop a dancing humanoid robot for entertainment robots. In this paper, we propose three fundamental methods of a dancing robot aimed at the sound feedback system in which a robot listens to music and automatically synthesizes dance motion based on the musical features. The first study analyzes the relationship between motion and musical rhythm and extracts important features for imitating human dance motion. The second study models modification of upper body motion based on the speed of played music so that a humanoid robot dances to a faster musical speed. The third study automatically synthesizes dance performance that reflects both rhythm and mood of input music.