“Duetto”, a research project in which the relationship between artificial intelligence and human movement is investigated, it was born within the S+T+ARTS project, a European program that promotes the exchange between Science, Technology and Art, and is led by Sony CSL – Rome, in collaboration with Centro Coreografico Nazionale/Aterballetto, La Piroetta/Aleph Dance Company dance school and the European University of Rome.

Duetto is an innovative scientific project that combines generative artificial intelligence with the study of human movement. The goal is to develop models that can understand how people move in response to certain inputs. To achieve this, Sony Csl – Rome asked performers at various levels to dance in front of some cameras to a variety of music asking them to improvise.

During this phase of data collection, Sony CSL – Rome also collaborated with choreographers and maitre de ballet so that they could, in some cases, direct the movement of the dancers through choreographic hints, to make sure that their movement was as varied as possible.

Preliminary experiments have already made it clear that “Duetto” will become more and more like a virtual creative partner for the choreographer or dancer, that is, a system capable of suggesting new movement sequences, exploring original solutions that go beyond traditional canons. Artificial intelligence would not merely imitate what already exists, but would be capable of coming up with fresh new ideas, which the dancer may or may not take in, adapt, or rework.

To better understand “Duetto,” a comparison can be made with a language model such as ChatGPT. If ChatGPT works with words and creates sentences by combining them in meaningful ways, “Duetto” does the same with the human body: it takes body postures as “words” and combines them into sequences that become actual “body talk,” or movements.

In short, “Duetto” explores the language of movement and dialogues with those who interact with it through physical propositions that stimulate the imagination, offering a new way to create, improvise and innovate in the field of dance and, more generally, the performing arts.

Studying this kind of human-machine interaction centered on movement is very interesting for several reasons, first of all there is scientific interest of Sony CSL – Rome in the study of what a novelty is and how it is created, then there’s the fundamental question about human creativity: far from replacing us, can AI be useful to our creativity, can it increase our creativity so that it can be useful to us in finding more and more fitting solutions to the most diverse problems of humanity?