[thechat] Music Information Retrieval for Dance Identification

[S.M.German]

> S.M.German noted he was working on ...
> 
> >>an application or service to tell folks what dance they
> >>should do to the song playing.  (I.E. rhumba, samba, foxtrot, etc.)
> 
> 
> 
> Hi Sean!
> 
> I have no idea if there is any demand for such a thing or not ... but that
is one
> seriously cool question!     ;-)
> 
> One odd area to look for information on this would be in the science and
> study of brain disorders.  There have been a number of people, (including
> Che Guevara), that have a condition known as rhythm deafness.  This is a
> form of amusia.  Che might, for example, have danced a mambo while the
> orchestra played a tango.  Because this is a defined disorder there must
be
> ways to test for it.  That would lead me to suspect that there might be
some
> defined standards somewhere.
> 
> Good luck hunting and please let us know what you turn up in your
> investigation,
> RonL.
> 

[Sean M German] 

I find the whole world of music and rhythms terribly fascinating.  Why
should we recognize rhythm patterns?  Why is Che's condition mentioned above
the exception and not the rule? How can people with various speech
impediments sing flawlessly?  How are large groups of untrained singers able
to chant Dar-ryl (or Air Ball) all at the same pitch?[1]

The most interesting things I've found during my research likely aren't
applicable at all to my project[2], but involve visualizations.  My favorite
is Songle.  [3] Their charts are something out of Edward Tufte.

I haven't found any available consumer applications that do the type of
rhythm or dance classification I'm thinking of, but through the references
in an MIR tutorial I found a couple papers describing techniques for such
classification. [4]  My next step is to work forward and see what more
recent work references those papers.

All in all, good news for me this week.  With some documented algorithms I
can focus on implementation and interface.

Thanks!


Sean

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/1995-09-24/news/mn-49383_1_air-ball
[2] This is an academic project, but not a doctoral thesis.  There is no
requirement to be unique or ground-breaking.  
[3] http://songle.jp/
[4]
http://recherche.ircam.fr/anasyn/peeters/ARTICLES/Peeters_2005_ISMIR_RhythmC
lassification.pdf
http://mtg.upf.edu/files/publications/paper151-85bb38cdeb58e2d8414fdba7d64c3
542.pdf