Temporal interaction between an artificial orchestra conductor and human musicians

Abstract

The Virtual Conductor project concerns the development of the first properly interactive virtual orchestra conductor—a Virtual Human that can conduct a piece of music through interaction with musicians, leading and following them while they are playing. This article describes our motivation for developing such a system; related work in the areas of ambient entertainment and coordinated timing, automatic music processing, virtual humans, and conducting; the design, implementation, and evaluation of the Virtual Conductor, and, finally, contains a discussion of the resulting system and expected developments in the (still ongoing) Virtual Conductor project.