Rhythmic Motion Analysis using Motion Capture and Musical Information

The number of Japanese traditional dancers has been decreasing. Without performers, some dances will be disappeared, because they can not be recorded by conventional media, such as paper. We have proposed an archiving method specifically for dancing pattern. Our method has four main stages: 1. Digitizing motions by motion capture systems, 2. Analyzing motions, 3. Synthesizing motions, 4. Reproducing the dance motions by CG and humanoid robots. In order to effectively record the moving patterns, motion primitives are extracted. Each motion primitive describes each basic motion. However, most previous primitive extraction fails to provide the rhythm which results in unrhythmic synthesized motion. In this paper, we propose a new motion analysis method, which integrates music rhythm into the motion primitives. Our experiment confirmed that our motion analysis yielded the motion primitives in accordance to the music rhythm.