Orchestra of Faces
A new semester is well underway, and with half of my (first) senior year completed, this second semester brings some interesting topics to study. Currently, I am in a class that teaches techniques in interactive video and sound. This post contains the creative brief for my first project. I am pleased to announce the Orchestra of Faces.
Orchestra of Faces
Overview
Orchestra of Faces is a simple concept that allows a group of friends to build and modify a piece of music through their presence and spatial relationships. Instead of using buttons, keyboards, and other input devices to control a song, the user or group of users becomes the controller.
Method
Through the use of computer vision technology and a digital camcorder, the face of each member of the orchestra will be recognized and tracked. The location, position, and scale of each face will be converted to a live stream of numerical data that will be used to modify pre-sequenced MIDI loops.
For example, when one participant approaches the Orchestra of Faces, the first MIDI sequence initiates. As the participant moves closer to the camera, the scale of their face changes, thus altering the stream of data used to modify the MIDI sequence. When a second participant enters the camera’s field of vision, their face is detected and their presence initiates the second MIDI sequence. The process of adding members and tracking their positions continues until each person leaves the camera’s field of vision, thus ending the MIDI playback.
Technology
Orchestra of Faces uses the following technologies:
- Max/MSP/Jitter by Cycling74 – http://www.cycling74.com/
- cv.jit computer vision library by Jean-Marc Pelletier – http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~jovan02/cv/
- Digital Camcorder
- Macbook Pro
This concept and brief is © Jason Lang, 2009.
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Tags: interactive, projects
It sounds like this is going to be really interesting. I’d love to see a video of this in action when you finish.