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 using the excellent MIRToolbox for Matlab for a lot of sound analysis applications these days. It meets a lot of my needs, but there are a few things that I miss. Perhaps the most important one is the ability to make clean greyscale spectrograms. The regular mirspectrum function returns a colour spectrogram with lots of garnish, like this: Such a spectrogram may be useful in some contexts, but not always.

To allow everyone to watch their own synchronised spectrograms and motiongrams, I have made a small application called AudioVideoAnalysis. Download AudioVideoAnalysis for OS X (8MB) It currently has the following features: Draws a spectrogram from any connected microphone Draws a motiongram/videogram from any connected camera Press the escape button to toggle fullscreen mode Built with Max/MSP by Cycling ‘74 on OS X.5. I will probably make a Windows version at some point, but haven’t gotten that far yet.