The Perceived Fit Between Music and Movement: A Multisensory Account of Dance as a Novel Feature Type.

This article focuses on explaining the normative perception of the fit between bodily movement and music in expressivist dance, arguing that this fit is grounded in a unique multisensory perceptual capacity. Drawing on Casey O’Callaghan’s concept of novel feature types—features perceptible only through the integrated cooperation of multiple senses—the author proposes that dance is such a novel feature type, essentially perceived through vision, audition, and proprioception simultaneously. This multisensory account addresses challenges in prior theories by showing how spectators can non-inferentially perceive the structural relationship between music and movement, thereby justifying normative judgments about their fit. The approach also clarifies how innocent, untrained spectators can recognize dance as a unified perceptual phenomenon and supports the possibility of intersubjective agreement in dance criticism across cultural contexts.