Interacting with a music conducting system

Abstract

Music conducting is the art of directing musical ensembles with hand gestures to personalize and diversify a musical piece. The ability to successfully perform a musical piece demands intense training and coordination from the conductor, but preparing a practice session is an expensive and time-consuming task. Accordingly, there is a need for alternatives to provide adequate training to conductors at all skill levels; virtual reality technology holds promise for this application. The goal of this research was to study the mechanics of music conducting and develop a system capable of closely simulating the conducting experience. After extensive discussions with professional and nonprofessional conductors, as well as extensive research on music conducting material, we identified several key features of conducting. A set of lightweight algorithms exploring those features were developed to enable tempo control and instrument emphasis, two core components of conducting. By using position/orientation sensors and data gloves as the interface for human-computer interaction, we developed a functional version of the system. Evaluating the algorithms in real-world scenarios gave us promising results; most users of the final system expressed satisfaction with the virtual experience. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.