Cloud Piano by David Bowen

In this work, the designer combined Max/Msp, video capture device and robotic device to generate piano piece using realtime motions of cloud. This is an interesting idea, and it’s also my passion —  generate and analyze music automatically.

In the video above, the performance of real-time piano piece is not as good as normal piano piece is, however. Several reasons can be found: first, piano piece in this project is mono pitched, which to a large extent decreases the content a piece could express; second, the very low part is frequently shown, so we can guess the designer doesn’t do a good job in optimizing the performance based on real world piece; third, there are noises generated by the pressing of robotic fingers which should be decreased.

Overall, this project has an interesting idea and did a fairly good job, however, there are still many points the designer should consider.

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Flexible Muscle-Based Locomotion for Bipedal Creatures

This is a project kind of out of the boundary of interactive art and computational design. But it’s  still a wonderful finding to share. It uses muscle model on bipedal creatures to mimic their motions and activities, driven by 3D control. The synthesized controllers can locomote in real time at a range of speeds, and can traverse variable terrains.