On September 18, Dr. Andrea Salgian will present her paper “Teaching Robots to Conduct: Automatic Extraction of Conducting Information from Sheet Music” at the 40th International Computer Music Conference in Athens, Greece. This year’s conference will be jointly held with the 11th Sound and Music Computing Conference and will run September 14 – 20. Dr. Salgian’s paper was accepted for presentation by the International Computer Music Association (ICMA), an international organization of individual researchers and institutions who are involved in the technical, creative, and performance aspects of computer music.
Coauthored by TCNJ alumnus Laurence Agina and Dr. Teresa Nakra, Associate Professor in TCNJ’s Music Department, the paper was written as part of a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Students who majored in Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Music, and Interactive Multimedia worked together in a semester-long class to build robots that could conduct a real orchestra and were later utilized during performances by TCNJ’s music ensembles. The culminating paper describes an algorithm that can parse sheet music encoded in MIDI files in order to extract conducting information such as tempo, dynamics, and entrance cues. This process is the robotic equivalent of a human conductor reading the sheet music and deciding which gestures to perform and when. Current TCNJ students continue to work on improving the conducting robots technology in mentored research projects.
For more on the International Computer Music Conference, please visit the conference’s webpage: http://www.computermusic.org/
