Personal Orchestra is an exhibit that lets museum visitors conduct an audiovisual recording of an orchestra. The user controls tempo and volume of the recording via conducting gestures. The user can emphasize an instrument section by conducting towards it. An electronic music stand shows the currently played musical material.
Personal Orchestra is being developed in a cooperative effort of Telecooperation and Media Computing Group (RWTH Aachen). The Personal Orchestra installation in Vienna features a recording of the famous "Vienna Philharmonic."
Personal Orchestra consists of three subsystems:
- Gesture recognition
- Audio- and video processing
- Music stand.
A special baton in conjunction with sensor technology provides the gesture recognition subsystem with position data. The gesture recognition subsystem matches the input against a model of conducting gestures and determines conducted tempo, volume and emphasis of instrument groups.
The recording is altered in real-time to fit the parameters provided by the gesture recognition subsystem. The tempo of the recording is altered by an enhanced phase vocoder algorithm.
An electronic music stand displays the musical material.
Contact@Telecooperation (TU Darmstadt):
Telis Hadjakos
telis(at)tk(dot)informatik(dot)tu-darmstadt(dot)de
Contact@Media Computing Group (RWTH Aachen)
Prof. Dr. Jan Borchers
jan(at)rwth-aachen(dot)de