The link between musicians and dancers is generally described as strong in many traditional musics and this holds also for Scandinavian Folk Music - spelmansmusik. Understanding the interaction of music and dance has potential for developing theories of performance strategies in artistic practice and for developing interactive systems. In this paper we investigate this link by having Swedish folk musicians perform to animations generated from motion capture recordings of dancers. The different stimuli focus on motions of selected body parts as moving white dots on a computer screen with the aim to understand how different movements can provide reliable cues for musicians. Sound recordings of fiddlers playing to the "dancing dot" were analyzed using automatic alignment to the original music performance related to the dance recordings. Interviews were conducted with musicians and comments were collected in order to shed light on strategies when playing for dancing. Results illustrate a reliable alignment to renderings showing full skeletons of dancers, and an advantage of focused displays of movements in the upper back of the dancer.

QC 20210920