Express it!: An Interactive System for Visualizing Expressiveness of Conductor's Gestures

Abstract

A conductor provides a single unified vision of how to interpret and perform music. However, perceiving a conductor's musical intention and expression is quite challenging as they convey information to performers with subtle, nuanced, and highly individualized gestures. This artwork visualizes the conductor's gestures in order to give the audience a better understanding of its expressivity. To represent the expressivity of the gestures, we created motion profiles over eight frames, at 30 frames per second, and compared them to previously modeled gestures using three motion factors, called Weight, Space and Time from related concepts in Laban Movement Analysis (LMA). Based on this, we have created a real-time, interactive visualization that is driven by the motion factor parameters. The visualization receives the input video stream, and it is transformed into a representation of the three motion factors extracted from the real-time conducting gestures.