Learning the Grammar of Dance

Abstract : Human motion sequences that are generated by computer algorithms may contain abrupt transitions: places where consecutive body positions would require physically impossible or stylistically illegal moves. We use graph--theoretic methods to learn the "grammar" of joint movements in a given corpus and then apply memory-bounded A* search to the resulting transition graphs--using an in order to reduce the search space--to find appropriate interpolation sequences. The application that motivated the development of these methods is an algorithm that uses the mathematical properties of chaos to generate variations on dance and martial arts sequences.