Rope Flow Music: An Embodied Instrument that Sonifies a Movement Practice

We present an unsupervised learning approach for turning rope flow (a movement practice in which a weighted rope is swung in continuous, looping patterns around the body) into a musical instrument. Two inertial sensors mounted on the handles of a rope stream the motion to a machine-learning pipeline that discovers the vocabulary of movements a performer produces, and maps that vocabulary to sound in real time. The artwork is a performance: a body swinging a rope, generating music whose rhythm comes from the swing rather than a clock. It addresses the theme of Agency by asking where agency lives when music is made together by a body, a learned model, and a language model coupled through an action-perception loop to produce an artistic work. We propose a symbiotic rather than extractive relationship with the machine, one in which the performer trains the model with their own movement and the machine reveals structure in that movement the performer cannot see.