Security News > 2020 > January > Nobody boogies quite like you

Surely one does not move the same way in response to a song by Rage Against the Machine as to one by Bob Dylan - and research has indeed shown that audio features extracted from the acoustic signal of music influence the quality of dancers' movements.

The original question: could they determine the style of music just by watching how people are dancing? Previous research has indicated that you can: low-frequency sound generated by kick drum and bass guitar relates to how fast you bop your head around, while high-frequency sound and beat clarity have been associated with a wider variety of movement features, including hand distance, hand speed, shoulder wiggle and hip wiggle.

The upshot: how we move our head and limbs are our dance fingerprints, or what the paper refers to as our "Motoric" fingerprints - we move in mathematically similar ways regardless of what kind of music we're bopping to.

In theory, different individuals' movements may covary differently between any markers in any dimensions, but as it is highly unlikely that participant' were consciously controlling these aspects of their movements, the fact that these movement features could be used to accurately classify individuals across various musical stimuli suggests that we each have our own 'motoric fingerprint' which is evidenced in our free dance movements, regardless of what music is playing.

While we can be identified by how we dance to any type of music, how we dance doesn't tell anybody what kind of music we're listening to.

News URL

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/01/22/nobody-boogies-quite-like-you/