Audimance: a Mobile App for Listening to Dance

What if you could listen to dance?  What if dance were both an aural and visual art form?  Audimance, our web/mobile application, offers users a way to experience dance through listening.  Developed in association with Kinetic Light’s DESCENT, Audimance is the first app that allows audience members to create their own auditory experience of dance.  Using an innovative interface, audience members can choose from a variety of specially developed sound tracks and create their own aesthetic experience of a dance by choosing which tracks they listen to and when.  

Access to dance for non-visual audiences has historically been in the form of audio description.  The app and its associated content grew from our recognition that there a limited number of qualified describers and a growing awareness of audience members’ desire for a more encompassing aesthetic experience. Led by people who are blind, visually-impaired and sighted, the Kinetic Light collective is creating audio content for DESCENT by sonifying the dancers’ bodies and by rendering the dance itself in sound.

The application is designed to be flexibly deployed and compatible with any user’s own devices, ensuring ease of technical access and no additional hardware cost for the presenter, and the application code will be generalized, abstracted, and open sourced for wide use.

This innovative approach shows how access need not be a retroactive functional accommodation; rather, access drives innovation and the creation of new art forms.