MirrorFugue is a Ph.D. research project by Xiao Xiao at the MIT Media Lab, exploring communicating gesture in music collaboration across space and time. The project is comprised of a set of interfaces for piano to visualise the gesture of a performance. Based on the idea that the visibility of gesture contributes to learning and synchronisation, MirrorFugue displays the hand and body movements of piano playing using metaphors from the physical world to connect musicians from disparate spaces and times – and you can even play with yourself from the past.
We designed two modes to visualize the hand gesture of a performance, which we term “Reflection” and “Organ”. Inspired by the reflective surface on a lacquered grand piano that mirrors the keyboard and player’s hands, Reflection mode shows the mirrored keyboard and hands of a performance. Organ mode displays the unaltered, top-town image of the collaborator’s keyboard like the aligned and offset keyboards of an organ.
MirrorFugue can be used in remote lessons to enable teachers and students to see each other’s playing. It could also be used to playback recordings of the self and others. A student can use MirrorFugue for practice support by recording a portion of a piece playing a duet with the recording. By displaying the body and the hands at full scale on the surface of the instrument, MirrorFugue evokes the presence of a pianist with a sense of intimate emotional expression. Examples below combine life-sized projection and the actuated keys of a Yamaha Disklavier.
The current prototype consists of MIDI keyboards, wide-angle cameras, projectors, using the MaxMSP/Jitter to manage video and sound. Xiao tested the remote communication by transferring 640×480 video at 30 frame per second over gigabit ethernet between two locations in the same building and were able to do so without noticeable latency. For their user studies, they placed two piano keyboards in the same room arranged to simulate a remote situation where two people cannot see each other but can hear each other and what is being played.
Take a moment to learn more about the project by watching Xiao’s talk from TEDxBoston (below). You can also jump to 12:40 just to see the performance. Also below is Ryuichi Sakamoto improvising to Satie on MirrorFugue.
If you embed digital information firmly in the physical world, if you engage multiple senses, if you create a feeling of space, and if you allow just a bit of room for the imagination to fill in the blanks, something really magical happens — Xiao Xiao at TEDxBoston
Advisors: Hiroshi Ishii / MIT Media Lab, Tod Machover / MIT Media Lab, Ken Perlin / NYU Media Research Lab and Donal Fox / MIT Music Dept.
See also Perceptual Canon by Xiao Xiao, an installation for a Yamaha Disklavier player piano that renders music as visual forms.
