Learning to Synthesize Arm Motion to Music By Example

We present a system that generates arm dancing motion to new music tracks, based on sample motion captured data of dancing to other pieces of music. Rather than adapting existing motion, as most music-animation systems do, our system is novel in that it analyzes both the supplied motion and music data for certain characteristics (eg. melodic contour, loudness, etc), and learns relationships between the two. When new music is provided, the characteristics are analyzed as before, and used to predict characteristics of the motion. A generative process then creates motion curves according to these constraints. A demonstration is presented showing the results on both slow and fast tunes, including an automatically-generated trio of backup dancers for a jazz standard. The system could be extended naturally to other movements beyond arm dancing.