Introduction

MyoBeats is an music-interaction design project based on gestures. It allows people to use guestures to control drum and gong beats and to create personalized music, bass effect, and applause effect by wearing myo which is a wireless armband. It is also an innovative interaction for musical control and music-making.

How it works

listen sound effect by click gesture below

Case Scenario

1. Gyroscope Data and Bass Effect

There is no doubt that every music fan wants a subwoofer (Bass Audio) at home, however, most devices are expensive for them. And also a pair of professional bass is hard to move around when you need an outside performance. Then what about having an electrical bass with gesture on your computer? Make it like bass sound and easy to take with.
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2. Myo Gestures and Drum Beats

The normal music accompaniments are usually toneless and always in the same way, what should we do if we want to sing with accompany more fun or make it in our own way? Since Myo can recognize different gestures, we want to generate various drum beats with different Myo gestures as accompaniments of singing. Myo has 5 gestures recognition: there are fist, wave-in, wave-out, finger-spread and double-tap. We designed 5 sound effects with these gestures respectively. For the fist gesture, we added the gong sound effect. For the wave-in and waveout, we designed a pair of drum beats. For the finger-spread, we designed a shorter sound effect. For the double-tap gesture, we added the longer sound effect instead to make it more abundant. In total, we designed two pairs of sound effects with comparison style, one last is single. Every sound effect is easy to recognize therefore user can know clearly which gesture are they doing and whether if they did right or not. Combining all of these sounds, users can easily create a piece of wonderful drum beats that belong to their own style.

3. Volume Control and Applause Effect

Nowadays, more and more people like to go to karaoke, partly because they could have better performance and gain good feeling of themselves when they are in Karaoke. The atmosphere there is quite hot, loud cheers and applauses rang out continuously. Which makes people really enjoyable. So the atmosphere of playing music is quite important to the people who like music. However, if it is possible to create this atmosphere with our computers at home? Even when you are alone with no audience, computer can interact with you.
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User Test

From the user test, the general performance is good. Most of the participants enjoy the performance and gave good feedback later. Among the three cases study, the applause and bass effects receive better feedback than Myo gesture accompaniment. From the user test, we find out that the gestural recognition isn’t very stable. Since the mechanism of Myo is to measure the muscle tension, we try to minimise the differences by creating profile for each participants. However, the results still vary among different users. The gesture recognitions are not accurate for some participants who are slim in arm.