Participants: |
Anne-Marie Burns Marcelo M. Wanderley (supervisor) |
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Collaborators: |
Barbara Mazzarino (InfoMus Laboratory, Genoa, Italy) Gualtiero Volpe (InfoMus Laboratory, Genoa, Italy) Antonio Camurri (InfoMus Laboratory, Genoa, Italy) |
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Funding: |
Quebec government (Programme de bourses pour de courts séjours d'études universitaires à l'extérieur du Québec) Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, EU 6th FP IST ENACTIVE Network of Excellence (1st internship at InfoMus, Genoa, 2004) Cost287-ConGAS (2nd internship at InfoMus, Genoa, 2007) NSERC Discovery Grant (M. Wanderley) (Research assistant) McGill University Alma Mater Student Travel Grant 2005, 2006 |
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Project Type: | Master's thesis (M.A. in Music Technology) | ||
Time Period: | Sept. 2003–Aug. 2006. (Completed.) |
This project is about the development of an automated method to visually detect and recognize fingering gestures of the left hand of a guitarist. The choice of computer vision to perform that task is motivated by the absence of a satisfying method for realtime guitarist fingering detection. The development of this computer vision method follows preliminary manual and automated analyses of video recordings of a guitarist. These first analyses led to some important findings about the design methodology of such a system, namely the focus on the effective gesture, the consideration of the action of each individual finger, and a recognition system not relying on comparison against a knowledge-base of previously learned fingering positions. Motivated by these results, studies on three important aspects of a complete fingering system were conducted. One study was on realtime finger tracking, another on string and fret detection, and the last on movement segmentation. Finally, these concepts were integrated into a prototype and a system for left-hand fingering detection was developed. Such a data acquisition system for fingering retrieval has uses in music theory, music education, automatic music and accompaniment generation and physical modeling.