In general, we divided our system design into three major components:
Video processing, which tracks the current position of drum stick in real time;
Audio processing, which detects the ‘hit’ of the drum stick and generates drum sounds;
Integration of the previous 2 parts.
Required materials
There are some required materials for our system setup:
A webcam: a camera is used to videotape the paper and stick movements. In our experiment we simply used the webcam embedded in our laptop. However, other users may use any other types of cameras depending on individual requirements.
A microphone: since the camera can only track the stick's position but not being able to know whether the stick really hits the paper to make sound, a microphone is used to detect when the stick actually hits the paper (when the player wants to play a note). We placed the microphone inside a sound-prove paper box to avoid noise interference.
Virtual drum kit system design
Notice how different parts are connected with each other.
Our whole system works under the sequence numbered(from 1 to 4) in the above illustration.
