Paolo Carosi Graziano Bertini IEI/CNR

What is LBS?

This system is a man/machine interface designed to allow an automatic synthesis system to be controlled by a human conductor. The aim is to endow that electronic music with the expressiveness and feeling which are characteristic of live performances.
The system recognizes those movements and gestures made by a conductor during a live performance which conform with international standards.

It discards part of those complicated and very personal gestures of a real conductor extracting a small set of fundamental parameters as beat point an back beat occurrence. These parameters are used to control an algorithmic Pascal Music composition.
You are allowed to modify in real time speed, strength, but also when, what and how a sequence of notes is played following a pascal routine. A newer simpler version allows conducting standard midi files.

Hardware components

The hardware components of the system are:

• a conductor baton with a light source placed at its tip to make tracing of movements easier;
• a CCD camera pointing towards the conductor's area of action;
• a special image-acquisition board, which converts images into an array of values associated to the levels of luminosity and gives the coordinates of the most luminous point in real time;
• an MS-DOS personal computer which hosts the Pascal Music system of composition and algorithmic execution equipped with a driver for output with a MIDI interface inserted on its bus;
• a set of fully commercial synthesis modules controlled via MIDI.