The Musical Session System with the Visual Interface
Yuichi Yoshida, Yasunori Yamagishi, Kazuki Kanamori, Naoki Saiwaki, Shogo
Nishida
Department of systems and human science
Graduate school of engineering science, Osaka University
email:
[email protected]
Abstract
In recent years, several music composition systems
have been published. They operate cooperatively with
emotional input. However, most of these systems
require users to have the ability to play music well.
We have constructed a musical session system that
children and novices can play pleasantly. The session
system is composed of two parts. One is musical, a
kind of instrument with which users can perform
music by modifying a combination ofthe phrases. The
other is a visual part which allows for visual, realtime, interactive manipulation during performance.
This prototype was evaluated by many children. The
result of the evaluations showed that children could
play this system pleasantly.
1 Introduction
Recently, due to developments in computer
technology, automatic musical performance,
cooperative performance, visualization of musical
information and media arts have been explored in
new ways. For instance, in research on session
systems, a communication model between users is
implemented in order to emulate a jazz style
(Masataka Goto 1999), (Sanae Wake 1994).
However, such systems demand that users should be
skilled musicians.
Now there are media arts with which users can
enjoy sounds and pictures interactively as well as a
new form of music score that is represented by
utilizing 3D CG. Examples include the research of
the visualization of music information (Kenji
Katsumoto 1997). Most of interactive arts and media
arts are constructed from artistic or other ambiguous
factors. Most of these programs place little
importance on the users' viewing of the music
representative CG. In the research of the musical
score, most of these systems visualize music that was
already composed or played. Little research has been
done in the field of the dynamic, real-time
visualization of music.
Based on the above points, we propose the
musical session system combined with a visual
interface. The visual interface can visualize the
change of the condition of the performance in realtime. The visual interface displays multimodal
pictures and adds enjoyable sounds. Further more, an
input device independent from conventional
instruments is added to the session system.
We constructed and evaluated the prototype
system as an integrated performance environment and
session.
2 Musical Session System
2.1 Session System
The existing session systems make phrases
according to the music chord by analysing the
structure of music. Therefore, users must have the
ability to play music and proficiency in the existing
systems as well as knowledge of music in order to
perform with the session system.
Our session system accounts for musical
construction (Yasunori Yamagishi 2001). The session
system makes musical performance by selecting
previously provided phrases based on analysis of the
combination of the music phrases. Users need not
have the ability to play music, nor do they need
knowledge of music because this session system
enables users to perform session like modifications of
music atmosphere by selecting prepared phrases
freely like a DJ.
2.2 Visualization of Music
We realize the ability of CG not only to visualize
the sounds of the scores but also to enjoy the
changing of sounds (Yuichi Yoshida 2001).
However, most of the existing systems only represent
the information of the music that was already played
or composed as a score using CG.
Our interface can visualize users' performance in
real-time, as it is connected to the session system. We
considered the following two points very important
factors for constructing the visual interface of the
session system.
1. How to visualize the information of music as a
real-time session.
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