Mmmmm: A Multi-modal Mobile Music Mixer

This paper presents Mmmmm; a Multimodal Mobile Music Mixer that provides DJs a new interface for mixing music on the Nokia N900 phones. Mmmmm presents a novel way for DJ to become more interactive with their audience and vise versa. The software developed for the N900 mobile phone utilizes the phones built-in accelerometer sensor and Bluetooth audio streaming capabilities to mix and apply effects to music using hand gestures and have the mixed audio stream to Bluetooth speakers, which allows the DJ to move about the environment and get familiarized with their audience, turning the experience of DJing into an interactive and audience engaging process. Mmmmm is designed so that the DJ can utilize hand gestures and haptic feedback to help them perform the various tasks involved in DJing (mixing, applying effects, and etc). This allows the DJ to focus on the crowd, thus providing the DJ a better intuition of what kind of music or musical mixing style the audience is more likely to enjoy and engage with. Additionally, Mmmmm has an “Ambient Tempo Detection mode in which the phones camera is utilized to detect the amount of movement in the environment and suggest to the DJ the tempo of music that should be played. This mode utilizes frame differencing and pixel change overtime to get a sense of how fast the environment is changing, loosely correlating to how fast the audience is dancing or the lights are flashing in the scene. By determining the ambient tempo of the environment the DJ can get a better sense for the type of music that would fit best for their venue. Mmmmm helps novice DJs achieve a better music repertoire by allowing them to interact with their audience and receive direct feedback on their performance. The DJ can choose to utilize these modes of interaction and performance or utilize traditional DJ controls using Mmmmms N900 touch screen based graphics user interface.