Hip-hop dance battles are events where dancers improvise to an unfamiliar DJ’s mix. The dancers’ technicality in responding to the music, along with the collective dimensions of these encounters, represents a largely unexplored area of investigation in HCI. Using an autobiographical design approach grounded in the hip-hop practice of the first author, we developed five interaction scenarios on a hip-hop–specific movement vocabulary. Our interactive sonification enables both individual and collective improvisation through synchronized motion sensing and interactive sound loops. This approach allowed us to design three interconnected workshops to investigate how dancers use sonification in improvisation. Our findings show that sonification was perceived either as a validation of movement or as a medium for open-ended exploration. We contribute with: (1) the formalization of a movement vocabulary and the design of interactive scenarios for hip-hop movement sonification, (2) insights into how dancers experience sonification through exploration and improvisation, and (3) guidelines for the design of movement sonification in hip-hop contexts.

While interaction techniques that use the temporal dimension have been used for a long time, such as multiple clicks or spring-loaded widgets, more advanced uses of rhythmic patterns have received little attention in HCI. Using such temporal structures to convey information can be particularly useful in situations where the visual channel is overloaded or even not available. In this paper we introduce Rhythmic Interaction as the use of rhythms for input. We report the results of two experiments that show that (i) rhythmic patterns can be efficiently reproduced by novice users and recognized by computer algorithms, and (ii) rhythmic patterns can be memorized as efficiently as traditional shortcuts when associating them with visual commands. Overall, these results demonstrate the potential of Rhythmic Interaction and open the way to a richer repertoire of interaction techniques.