Interactive groove visualization via multithreaded design

Abstract

Groove, the sense of rhythmic feel or musical swing, is one of the most essential factors for good musical performance. Groove visualization can help players/listeners acquire groove sensation and share impressive expressions of music, regardless of personal hearing ability or musical sense. In this paper, we propose an intuitive visualization system called "SeeGroove2", which converts MIDI musical inputs into graphical form interactively, with suggestion of its applicability to visualization in live music and to groove educational tool. Rhythm patterns are immediately rendered to various circular shapes by plotting each played note as a point and smoothly interpolating them. The SeeGroove2 system was implemented in a multithreaded fashion, by coupling threads of input processing at 1,920 Hz and threads of rendering at 60 Hz.