Kristina Ernsell and Jannica Thun

Synchronization between particle systems and music

Abstract

Music has been used as a tool to emotionally affect people for a long time, but what can be done to enhance the experience of a musical piece? How can you increase the effect? To combine a musical piece with some kind of animation adds an additional modality to the experience. This report evaluates and compares two different technologies for synchronization of a musical piece and a particle system in the software Blender 2.61. The two technologies evaluated are in the report referred to as Automatic-sync and Manual-sync. Two animations based on these technologies were simulated and evaluated by the requirements regarding the technologies difficulty, ability of self-influence and the result of the simulations in order to find the technology to recommend. The simulations were evaluated by an independent group of people. What arose in the evaluation was that Manual-sync was the technology to recommend, even if the ultimate one would be to combine the two.