Sensors for virtual musical environment: A short survey

Virtual Musical Instrument is an interface allowing performers to simulate the instrument either in air or by running the console application. The user keeps playing the virtual instrument as it is real one and visually sense for appropriate music. In this paper an attempt is made to give a brief overview of human interaction with systems for playing Indian musical instruments virtually. The system has to take the hand gestures as input to the musical interface and with the help of signal or image processing techniques like preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction and mapping along with suitable machine learning algorithms, should be able to produce the actual output of the physical instrument to be played and handle sound related aspects in terms of volume, tone, pitch, rhythm etc. Sensors supporting to track the hand finger's 3D parameters are identified and these features acting as an input to a digital musical interface with the help of appropriate gesture recognizing algorithms matching musical note of the actual physical instrument. Accurately recognizing 3D gestures poses different research challenges. Authors present an overview of latest sensors with different methods for finger motion capturing with its features, advantages and limitations.