Synthesising appropriate choreographies from music remains an open problem. We introduce MDLT, a novel approach that frames the choreography generation problem as a translation task. Our method leverages an existing data set to learn to translate sequences of audio into corresponding dance poses. We present two variants of MDLT: one utilising the Transformer architecture and the other employing the Mamba architecture. We train our method on AIST++ and PhantomDance data sets to teach a robotic arm to dance, but our method can be applied to a full humanoid robot. Evaluation metrics, including Average Joint Error and Fr\'echet Inception Distance, consistently demonstrate that, when given a piece of music, MDLT excels at producing realistic and high-quality choreography. The code can be found at github.com/meowatthemoon/MDLT.
@article{arxiv.2403.15569,
title = {Music to Dance as Language Translation using Sequence Models},
author = {André Correia and Luís A. Alexandre},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.15569},
year = {2024}
}