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What is Drancing ?
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Drancing is a gestural synthesis accelerometer music system (an "air instrument") under development by Dr Darren Kelly since 1996. Drancing employs triaxial-accelerometers (3D vector acceleration transducers) to synthesise music, visuals, and computer controls from human gestures, dance, and movement.
The name Drancing is derived from "Drumming-by-Dancing" (or "air drums" mode) which is just one of its many applications. It can also be used as an "air synthesizer", "air guitar", or "air piano", and to make sounds never heard or named before.
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- R & D projects
- The Drancing accelerometer music "air instrument"
- Drancing with Wiimotes via wireless Bluetooth (since 2008)
- The original Drancing accelerometer suit (since 1997)
- DranceWare: software for Drancing
- The Drancel: a 3D-accelerometer sound and light "atom" for the Drancing system
- Did you know ? About the Drancing accelerometer music system
- What is Drancing ?
- Drancing uses real-time synthesis of sound and visuals
- Drancing is acceleration-centric because acceleration is independent of a fixed reference system !
- Cable-based approaches have been rendered obsolete by modern wireless data telemetry (such as Bluetooth from the Wiimote).
- Drancing does not really care whether you use a Wii Remote or another source of accelerometer signals, it encapsulates any triaxial accelerometer as a conditioned "Drancel".
- I stop short of playing loops to establish a timebase, as it does NOT promote virtuosity in gestural music.
- I will probably migrate soon to completely synthetic (real-time generated) drums, instead of using triggered drum samples.
- Note: because the frequencies achievable by body movement are very low compared with audible oscillator frequencies it is not possible to demonstrate true frequency modulation (FM) with the variable frequency oscillator (VFO) mode.
- Terminology: "Drancing" actually refers to the entire accelerometer music system, including hardware; "DranceWare" refers to the audio and video synthesis software components, and a "Drancel" is a virtual encapsulation of a triaxial accelerometer.
- The 1st Drancing prototype from 1997 used MIDI triggered samples, including theatrical samples like bird noises, ringing telephones, and gun shots recordings !
- The audio in the video snippets of Drancing accelerometer music and visuals with Wii remotes was in fact recorded from system audio by a screencast capture system so that the modes and settings were also recorded visually simultaneously.
- The original Drancing sensor suit used 5 triaxial accelerometers in a "body star" pattern"
- This is the "Drumming-by-Dancing" air drums mode after which Drancing was originally named in 1997.
- Applications of Drancing
- History of the development of the Drancing "air music" instrument
- In the press: "Drancing past the keyboard"
- Galleries index: Drancing images and videos
- Drancing: overview of all videos involving the Drancing accelerometer music system and the Drancel RGB sound and light synthesis atom
- Terminology: A Drancer is an "acceleration avatar" of the Drancing accelerometer music and visuals system
- NeXML: a generative XML Schema with EMF Java bindings for the NeXus format
- Instrument ModelServer
- The Drancing accelerometer music "air instrument"
Related sites
- Webel's SysML/MBSE videos on Vimeo
- Webel's Drancel videos on Vimeo
- Webel's photo channel on SmugMug
- The GreenSoft company site
- The GreenDesk tutorial site
- The GreenDesk video channel on Vimeo
- The GreenSoft Twitter stream
- Webel's Drupal7 info site (ARCHIVED)
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