Temporal interaction between an artificial orchestra conductor and human musicians

The Virtual Conductor project concerns the development of the first properly interactive virtual orchestra conductor—a Virtual Human that can conduct a piece of music through interaction with musicians, leading and following them while they are playing. This article describes our motivation for developing such a system; related work in the areas of ambient entertainment and coordinated timing, automatic music processing, virtual humans, and conducting; the design, implementation, and evaluation of the Virtual Conductor, and, finally, contains a discussion of the resulting system and expected developments in the (still ongoing) Virtual Conductor project.