1 REAL-TIME MUSIC INFORMATION PROCESSING

This paper introduces music information processing as an area of research for Industrial Engineers and offers a sample of the types of engineering issues encountered in real-time music information processing. We present the Spiral Array model and the Center of Effect Generator (CEG) algorithm for tonal analysis. We extend the CEG algorithm to real-time in MuSA.RT, a 3D interactive tonal visualization system implemented using the Modular Flow Scheduling Middleware. 1. INTRODUCTION The explosion of digital music information has necessitated the developing of engineering decision tools for analyzing, processing and managing music information. This paper introduces music information processing as an area of research for Industrial Engineers and offers a sample of the types of engineering issues encountered in real-time music information processing. Any computer model for processing music information must begin with a representation that converts content information to numerical data for analysis. In Section 2, we describe the Spiral Array, a mathematical model for tonality (Chew, 2000), and how this geometric model can be used to extract and visualize tonal structure from music data. We then introduce MuSA.RT, a research initiative integrating real-time music processing and content-based graphical rendering in interactive immersive environments. MuSA.RT Op.1 is a system for mapping a live MIDI stream (produced by a keyboard) to the Spiral Array. The integration of live music, real-time computational analysis and interactive graphical representation is facilitated by the Modular Flow Scheduling Middleware (mfsm.sourceForge.net).