The MIROR platform for young children's music and dance creativity. Reflexive interaction meets body-gesture, embodied cognition, and Laban educational dance

Within the framework of the Musical Interaction Relying On Reflexion 1 (MIROR) project, the MIROR platform was proposed as an innovative adaptive system for early childhood music and movement education, and applied to a variety of contexts such as general educational settings, musical and dance schools, music and arts organizations, families at home, therapeutic contexts, and teacher education programs (Addessi, 2013). The MIROR platform was conceived as a virtual environment composed by several applications that implemented interactive reflexive musical systems or IRMS (Pachet, 2006) within technology-enhanced learning. At the conclusion of the MIROR project, three applications were implemented: (1) MIROR-Impro, for music improvisation, (2) MIROR-Compo, for music composition (Pachet, Roy, & Barbieri, 2011), and (3) MIROR-Body Gesture for music and dance composition (Volpe, Varni, Addessi, & Mazzarino, 2012; Varni, Volpe, Segaleo, Mancini, & Lepre, 2013). In this article, we provide an overview of the work carried out so far on reflexive interaction and embodied cognition within the framework of the MIROR project. First, we introduce the reflexive interaction paradigm and its connections with embodied cognition and dance education, and then present the methodology for designing the MIROR-Body Gesture application along with two studies on the MIROR-Body Gesture and the MIROR-Impro. We end the article by introducing the MIROR-Impro and discussing some examples of its educational applications.