Real-Time Spatial Music Composition System (RTSMCS) & RTSMCS based “Air Guitar” system

The Real-Time Spatial Music Composition System (RTSMCS)

The RTSMCS (Real-Time Spatial Music Composition System) is system for real-time music composing that utilizes hand movement / position data in conjunction with a database of categorized short musical segments and a predefined algorithm that can combine and restructure such segments, to produce novel musical creations.

In short the system does the following:

• Captures the system operator’s hand positions + orientation in space
• Uses a subset of the position data to control the manner in which a semi-autonomous music composition algorithm, which makes its music up using pre-written short segments of music from a given database, will currently create its music.
• Various musical transformations are applied to the music generated by the composition algorithm, based on the rest of the hand position data.
• The real-time generated music is sent to a MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) compatible instrument to play it, and is stored in the end of the session to a MIDI file.

Further more, the system also provides a reusable framework which can be used to build various real-time music creation and manipulation systems.

The system was developed using the following tools:

• Development language: Python 2.7
• IDE: JetBrains PyCharm
• External python libraries: mido, pygame, optirx, nibabel

For more information, please see the RTSMCS presentation.

RTSMCS presentation

The RTSMCS based “Air Guitar” system

The RTSMCS based “Air Guitar” is an interactive musical entertainment system, that gives the user an experience similar to that of playing guitar, but doesn’t require any real guitar playing skills. It does so by taking on loose principles of guitar playing technique and removing the need for string fingering, fine motor skills and musical knowledge.

For more information, please see the “Air Guitar” presentation.

air guitar presentation