Acquisition of violin instrumental gestures using a commercial EMF device
Esteban Maestre, Jordi Bonada, Merlijn Blaauw, Alfonso Pérez, Enric Guaus · 2007
This paper presents a method for the acquisition of violin instrumental gesture parameters by using a commercial two-sensor 3D tracking system based on electro-magnetic field (EMF) sensing. The methodolgy described here is suitable for acquiring instrumental gesture parameters of any bowed-string instrument, and has been devised by paying attention to intrusion, flexibility, and robustness. After reviewing relevant related work in the field, we give an overview of the application context, pointing out some basic needs to be fulfilled for our research purposes. Then, we present the steps for calibrating the system, followed by details on the computation of a number of relevant instrumental gesture parameters. The use of a number of the extracted parameters to perform score-performance alignment and database automatic annotation is also outlined. Finally, we conclude stating next steps in using acquired data, along with further developments of the methodology. many instrumental gesture parameters as possible, (2) to be accurate, (3) to be easily attached to any violin/bow, and (4) to present a small effect on the instrument playability. As a first step towards our research goals, we use the acquired parameters for automatically annotating a performance database by applying a custom score-performance alignment procedure. The paper is structured as follows. First, we offer an outlook to the related work in the field, highlighting the main differences with the approach presented here. Then, we put our work into context, pointing out our research purposes, and discussing the fulfillment of our application requirements. Section 4 outlines the calibration procedure, while Section 5 gives the details of the computation of a number of instrumental gesture parameters. In Section 6, we present the score-alignment procedure devised for annotating our database. We conclude by discussing further developments of the methodology and future uses of our gathered data. 1.