Dynamic Time Warping for Music Conducting Gestures Evaluation

Musical performance by an ensemble of performers often requires a conductor. This paper presents a tool to aid the study of basic conducting gestures, also known as meter- mimicking gestures, performed by beginners. It is based on the automatic detection of musical metrics and their subdivisions by analysis of hand gestures. Musical metrics are represented by visual conducting patterns performed by hands, which are tracked using an RGB-D camera. These patterns are recognized and evaluated using a probabilistic framework based on dynamic time warping (DTW). There are two main contributions in this work. Firstly, a new metric is proposed for the DTW, allowing better alignment between two gesture movements without the use of explicit maxima local points. Secondly, the time precision of the conducting gesture is extracted directly from the warping path and its accuracy is evaluated by a confidence measure. Experimental results indicate that the classification scheme represents an improvement over other existing related approaches.