Biorobotics Laboratory BioRob

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Aïsha Hitz - Master Project Winter 2007-2008



Synchronization of movements of a real humanoid robot with music

Assistants: Sarah Degallier, Ludovic Righetti







Abstract:
When listening to music, people intuitively detected a certain tempo and move their body to the rhythm of the song. They are influenced by an external signal that is the music and adapt their movement to its tempo. This behavior could be imitated using oscillators, dynamical systems that have the capability to synchronize to an external signal, which is the music signal characterized by its frequency and its phase. As the frequency represents the tempo, the phase symbolizes the beats that are detected by people, when tapping to the rhythm of a song. Like people, oscillators should then adapt their behavior to the music, when modifying their frequency and their phase. So the aim of this project was to detect the tempo of any song with adaptive frequency oscillators developed by L. Righetti and to transmit this tempo to the drumming controller written by S. Degallier.



Adaptive frequency oscillators:
The first part of the project consisted in studying oscillators and especially their synchronization to an external signal. Adaptation is added to the Hopf oscillators thanks to a third equation describing the evolution of the oscillator frequency. The oscillator frequency evolves then toward the frequency of the external input signal, that is here a music song.
The advantage of these adaptive frequency oscillators is their continuous adaptation. As long as there is an external signal applied to them, they adapt their frequency. One of the purposes to do then the detection on-line is the change in tempo that can happen in a song.

Simulations:
After testing the feasibility of using the adaptive frequency oscillators to tempo detection, an implementation on the humanoid robot in Webots and then on the real humanoid robot Hoap2 was considered. The results can be viewed with these simulations.

Report and presentation


Report:

Related works


Papers:

Simulations with music


Implementation on the real robot, with different songs: