Abstract:

Choral conducting is a meeting among the music, the conductor, and the performers. But, what are the responsibilities of the conductors? Mainly, they should help the choir to keep the rhythm, transmit them the nuances of the play, and make all the elements of the score consistent. The non-verbal language of a choir director is a fundamental part of any choir performance and is highly reinforced in music conservatories. However, one of the main problems that conductors face is the difficulty in their practice since they do not have at their disposal a real choir or an expert in providing them with useful feedback.

This project aims to make use of a gamified virtual reality and gesture capture to offer choir conductors with a safe and useful place to practice and improve. Thus, we intend to overcome the lack of means by offering the user a gamified tool divided into initial tutorials and more challenging levels. We aim to offer an experience as close as possible to a real choir. In this way, the student (future conductor) can control aspects such as tempo, volume, and tone with his hands, and can also select the voice that should start singing. Those aspects make our tool an effective way to practice choir conducting before facing real choirs.

In this paper, we present the design and developing phases of the project. Even though we do not have a fully playtesting yet, experts' opinions agree on the usefulness of the project as a complementary tool for the future choir direction students, providing a highly accurate and realistic space to practice the needed abilities.

Keywords:

Music, Choir, choir conductor, Virtual reality.