My Own Custom Music Program

I was asked to submit a research paper to a conference by my future PhD advisor. Due to the lack of time, I've decided to pick up a topic closely related with one of my hobbies. As noted, I'm studying music, and have been playing with a number of instruments including the saxophone and the EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument). One of the things that I figured that might be interesting for me is to actually work on a type of application that could be useful when I play with the instruments. As the EWI is an electronic instrument, I selected it as a topic to work on.

If you noticed the following random pictures below, it is actually part of the application I've worked on. If you looked carefully, you can notice the picture are basically extracting information from me playing with the EWI finding which part of the frame in the camera feed I was in. This information is then relayed to the software mixer that could change parameters such as the panning effects.




The application worked out pretty well, and it allowed me as the musician to change panning without having to be at the mixer which could be useful in certain situations. One example would be creating sound effects that uses lots of panning. That is one area that I could save alot of time.

Anyway, after much work on the topic, a a few ideas struck me. If I used two cameras, I could actually plot my position in 3D, which wasn't that difficult to do. Another brilliant idea that popped up my head was using motion sensor tools (e.g. Nintendo WII remote anyone?) to help in music playing.

The lesson I've learnt in the drafting of the paper was quite fun. To be exact, playing musical instruments is fun, and making programs to add to that doubles the fun! You might want to try something like that if you have the time ;)