Yesterday, PhD fellow Mojtaba Karbassi presented his research on impedance control in robotic drumming at RITMO. I will surely get back to discussing more of his research later. Today, I wanted to share the analysis of one of the videos he showed. Mojtaba is working on developing a robot that can play a double stroke drum roll. To explain what this is, he showed this video he had found online, made by John Wooton: ...
I am happy to announce a new version of VideoAnalysis, a standalone application for OS X and Windows for creating visualizations and extract motion features from video files. VideoAnalysis was developed as a standalone version of the Musical Gestures Toolbox. I began working on the toolbox back in 2004, as a collection of modules for Max/MSP/Jitter. Then some people asked me to make a standalone version with some of the core functionality. This version was primarily developed for music researchers, but is also used for sports, dance, healthcare, architecture, and interaction design. ...
In some recent posts I have explored the creation of motiongrams and average images, multi-exposure displays, and image masks. In this blog post I will explore different ways of generating keyframe displays using the very handy command line tool FFmpeg. As in the previous posts, I will use a contemporary dance video from the AIST Dance Video Database as an example: The first attempt is to create a 3x3 grid image by just sampling frames from the original image. I spent some time exploring different ways of doing this. It is possible to do it with a one-liner: ...
A couple of days ago I presented the paper “Motion-sound Interaction Using Sonification based on Motiongrams” at the ACHI 2012 conference in Valencia, Spain. The paper is actually based on a Jamoma module that I developed more than a year ago, but due to other activities it took a while before I managed to write it up as a paper. See below for the full paper and video examples. The Paper Download paper (PDF 2MB) Abstract: The paper presents a method for sonification of human body motion based on motiongrams. Motiongrams show the spatiotemporal development of body motion by plotting average matrices of motion images over time. The resultant visual representation resembles spectrograms, and is treated as such by the new sonifyer module for Jamoma for Max, which turns motiongrams into sound by reading a part of the matrix and passing it on to an oscillator bank. The method is surprisingly simple, and has proven to be useful for analytical applications and in interactive music systems. ...