That’s the title of a story I wrote in 1976. Good lord, that’s almost 42 years ago! It was published in the July 1976 issue of Galaxy.

I can’t possibly tell you just how thrilled I was to be appearing in a magazine I read faithfully every month. I mean, this was where Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, Alfred Bester, Cordwainer Smith, and Robert Silverberg were published, among many others! I finally began to believe that I was actually a science fiction writer.

In fact, I owned a straight run of Galaxy Science Fiction, starting in October 1950 and going up to that current year. I found most of them in musty old bookstores all over the state of Texas, the kind where stacks of forgotten paperbacks and magazines spilled out onto the floor.

Part of that story had to do with a method of turning dance into music. Movements of your body would produce sound.

Now it seems someone has made such a device. It uses artificial intelligence and a whole boatload of computers, and what it does, it seems to me, is turn your body into a Theremin. Here it is.

Okay. It’s amazing, but I will admit that it’s not really my kind of music, nor my kind of dance. However, it is clear that this is just the first version of this sort of program. It’s primitive. But the possibilities are endless.

For one thing, I will expect to see something like a motion capture suit on the next dancer to try this instead of all the electrodes.

And why not a whole orchestra of dancers? One moves the string part, another twists and turns as a woodwind, another leaps into the brass, and one big fellow is sounding the percussion! Toot, whistle, plunk, boom, that’s where the music comes from. I’d pay to see that!

May 8, 2018
Vancouver, WA