Musicality experiments in lead and follow dance

Partner dancing requires realtime coordination between a human leader and follower, and so exemplifies other decentralized systems: supervisory control, coordination of agent teams. The paper reports an experiment in which the shared musical environment is manipulated to display one song to the leader and a different song to the follower. Results indicate that, indeed, musical cues indicate the appropriateness or inappropriateness of specific moves at specific points, but that the physical communication between the leader and the follower is robust to differences in song structure.