m-shaper: A Sketch Drawing System for Musical Shape Generation

This paper proposes a sketch drawing system called m-shaper for musical shape generation. Through simple sketch drawing, users can generate musical shape configuration which can be played by a computer. One key ingredient of the process is a unique concept for the interactive musical shape generation that combines shape and sound based on the designers' manual inputs. m-shaper captures the numerical values of drawing characteristics and determines how the musical notes and shapes can be generated. Using a tablet, four sketch movements are captured such as pressure, tilt, rotation and speed. Each point of a shape corresponds to a certain musical note that represents a type of instrument, duration, pitch, and octave. The current m-shaper has been developed as a computational tool for supporting the schematic design process. Designers in m-shaper draw geometric sketches with a musical inspiration and explore possible conceptual forms. They also can control the parameters for results and transform their sketch drawing.