Music-Driven Character Animation

Music-driven character animation extracts musical features from a song and uses them to create an animation.  In this project, we have developed  a system that builds a new animation directly from musical attributes, rather than simply synchronizing it to the music like similar systems.  Using a simple script that identifies the movements involved in the performance and their timing, the user can control the animation of characters easily.  Another unique feature of the system is its ability to incorporate multiple characters into the same animation, both with synchronized and unsynchronized movements.  A system that integrates Celtic dance movements is developed in this paper.  An evaluation of the results shows that the majority of animations are found to be appealing to viewers and that altering the music can change the attractiveness of the final result.

Reference

D. Sauer and Y.H. Yang, "Music-Driven Character Animation," Jan. 2007, ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications,Vol.5, Article 27, October 2009. (click here)

Animation results (zipped file 144MB)