Movement-based interactions are gaining traction, requiring a better understanding of how such expressions are shaped by designers. Through an analysis of an artistic process aimed to deliver a commissioned opera where custom-built drones are performing on stage alongside human performers, we observed the importance of achieving an intercorporeal understanding to shape body-based emotional expressivity. Our analysis reveals how the choreographer moves herself to: (1) imitate and feel the affordances and expressivity of the drones' 'otherness' through her own bodily experience; (2) communicate to the engineer of the team how she wants to alter the drones' behaviors to be more expressive; (3) enact and interactively alter her choreography. Through months of intense development and creative work, such an intercorporeal understanding was achieved by carefully crafting the drones' behaviors, but also by the choreographer adjusting her own somatics and expressions. The choreography arose as a result of the expressivity they enabled together. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models; Empirical studies in HCI.

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Practitioner-led artistic research, combined with interactive technologies, opens up new and unexplored design spaces. Here we focus on the creation of a tool for opera-singers to dynamically disform, change and accompany their voices. In an opera composed by one of the authors, the title-role singer needed to be able to alter his voice to express hawking, coughing, snuffling and other disturbing vocal qualities associated with the lead role -Joseph Merrick, aka "The Elephant Man". In our designerly exploration, we were guided by artistic experiences from the opera tradition and affordances of the technology at hand. The resulting instrument, The Throat III, is a singer-operated artefact that embodies and extends particular notions of operatic singing techniques while at the same time creating accompaniment. It therefore becomes an emancipatory tool, putting a spotlight on some of the power hierarchies between singers, composers, conductors, and stage directors in the operatic world. KeywordsArtistic research; operatic practice; autobiographical design; interactive instrument.

In the opera Sing the Body Electric! A Corporatorio, artists from the disciplines of opera, dance and the development of new musical instruments collaborated to create an onstage fusion of different technologies and artistic practices that connected performer, scenography and instrument. Gestures and movements of singers were captured by custom-built technologies. The singers also used custom-built technologies for transforming their vocal qualities and for creating synthesized accompaniment in real time. In this way the singers’ bodily musical processes further extended their vocal performances, rooted in operatic praxis, allowing for heightened expressivity and emergent scenic subjects.

Robocygne is an artistic project that revolves around the development of a custom-built robotic bird, dancing to a remix of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The artists created the choreography through a process in which movements were danced into the robot by the choreographer’s manipulation of the bird’s limbs, by hand, to the music. To enable this multitracking procedure, the artists, in collaboration with the engineers, developed novel software that allowed overlying recording of motions in synchronization with an audio track. From an artistic perspective, the authors discuss the search for choreographic and musical qualities and emphasize how material aspects of body and technology interrelate with emotional expression in Robocygne.