Jiayun Guo ------ DREU Experience 2010

About My Project

During my stay here in USC, I mainly work on the ESP system in the MuCoaCo (Music Computation and Cognition) lab.

The goal of ESP is to create a driving(pedals, wheel and display) interface for generating expressive performances interactively in real time from expressionless music files.
In ESP, the user drives a car on a virtual road that represents the music with its twists and turns; and makes decisions on how to traverse each part of the road. The driver's decisions affect in real-time the rendering of the piece. The pedals and wheel provide a tactile interface for controlling the car dynamics and musical expression, while the display portrays a first person view of the road and dashboard from the driver's seat.
The game-like interface aims to provide a compelling metaphor for expressive performance, so it's possible for non-experts who have no knowledge about how to play any musical instrument to generate a real piece from existing music.

At the same time, it allows expert musicians to experiment with expressive choice without having to first master the notes of the piece.

The ESP system is designed and implemented using the SAI/MFSM framework which Professor Alexandre R.J. Francois created.

There's a prototype of this project implemented by a doctor student long ago. Specifically, my work in MuCoaco lab is mainly about optimizing the software and port the system from PC to Mac in order to continue experiments with expressive performance using ESP.

During the first half time of my research, I spent most of the time working on updating the project with new MFSM library, killing tons of global variables and updating several modules, including introduce GLUTIO into the project. Then after one month break, the other half of my research is all about porting the PC-only program to mac.

updated September 2010.