THE M-OBJECTS: A SMALL LIBRARY FOR MUSICAL RHYTHM GENERATION AND MUSICAL TEMPO CONTROL FROM DANCE MOVEMENT IN REAL TIME
Carlos Guedes · 2005
This software library allows a dancer to control the tempo of an electronically-generated music score, and/or to generate musical rhythmic structures from bodily movement in real time in interactive dance performance. The movement data is gathered non-invasively, using a fixed video camera placed outside the area in which the dancer is moving. This library is implemented as a set of external objects, called the m-objects, for the modular programming environment Max/MSP [1] using an external object or library that performs framedifferencing analysis of a video stream in real time. This library should also be easily ported to other visual programming environments that perform video analysis in real time such as Isadora [2] or EyesWeb [3]. During the performance of a piece utilizing this software, the musician can give or take away the control over rhythm generation and/or musical tempo from the dancer, and substantially alter the musical content of a piece during performance. In this paper I describe each object comprising the library. In the demonstration session I will show the basic connections that have to be performed among the objects in order to generate musical rhythm and to control musical tempo from dance movement. 1.