Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds

This paper presents the first system for automatically generating three-dimensional animations of piano performance, given an input midi music file. A graph theory-based motion planning method is used to decide which set of fingers should strike the piano keys for each chord. As the progression of the music is anticipated, the positions of unused fingers are calculated to make possible efficient fingering of future notes. The system supports automatically generating animation for different complex piano techniques such as finger crossovers and arpeggio.

This paper presents two main contributions. First, a computational model of inextensible paper-like surfaces. Second, an algorithm that estimates this model's parameters from multiple images.