Wireless Digital/Analog Sensors for Music and Dance Performances

We developed very small and light sensors, each equipped with 3-axes accelerometers, magnetometers and gyroscopes. Those MARG (Magnetic, Angular Rate, and Gravity) sensors allow for a drift-free attitude computation which in turn leads to the possibility of recovering the skeleton of body parts that are of interest for the performance, improving the results of gesture recognition and allowing to get relative position between the extremities of the limbs and the torso of the performer. This opens new possibilities in terms of mapping. We kept our previous approach developed at ARTeM [2]: wireless from the body to the host computer, but wired through a 4-wire digital bus on the body. By relieving the need for a transmitter on each sensing node, we could built very light and flat sensor nodes that can be made invisible under the clothes. Smaller sensors, coupled with flexible wires on the body, give more freedom of movement to dancers despite the need for cables on the body. And as the weight of each sensor node, box included, is only 5 grams (Figure 1), they can also be put on the upper and lower arm and hand of a violin or viola player, to retrieve the skeleton from the torso to the hand, without adding any weight that would disturb the performer. We used those sensors in several performances with a dancing viola player and in one where she was simultaneously controlling gas flames interactively. We are currently applying them to other types of musical performances.