In the history of dance, a recurrent motif of choreographic innovation is its changing relationship to sound and rhythm. Beginning in the sixteenth century, dance notation was frequently designed analogously to musical notation. In the development of stage dance from the divertissements of the opera, dance was initially understood as a visual ornament for music. In both eighteenth-century romantic ballet and twentieth-century expressionist dance and modern dance, which sought to follow the rhythms inherent to the body, music served an ancillary function. Both art forms came together on equal terms in the premieres of the Ballets Russes. In the mid-twentieth century, Merce Cunningham and John Cage separated the composition processes of choreography and sound, working for the first time with coupling techniques, through which dance can influence other media forms. Since the 1980s, computer technology has increasingly made it possible to generate sound directly from movement. Since the 1990s, Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, and others have employed sound in their examination of the discursive framework conditions of the language of the body. Notated scores are increasingly used as a choreographic strategy in the creation of dance pieces.