Tuesday, December 1, 2009

How To Learn To Play Air Guitar

By Jarvis D. Burris

Each one of us have doubtless attempted to be taught how to play air guitar at least one time. Now, some PC scientists in Finland have come up with a device that turns this rock fantasy into real music an air guitar that truly plays.

Learn to Play Air Guitar like a Superstar

The virtual guitar is the invention of Aki Kinerva and other computer scientists from the Helsinki University of Technology. All you need is a pair of gloves and a camera. Then you take a rock star pose, like you were holding a real guitar and just rock away.

The camera will be tracking your hand movement along the hypothetical fret board, as well as the strumming of the other hand. Then the PC will receive the data and turn the gestures into licks and riffs. While you'll possibly not share the stage with Eric Clapton, the system gives any of us an opportunity to feel a bit like a rock celebrity.

Ever since rock music was born, teenagers, as well as many adults all over the world have been playing air guitar while listening to their favorite rock bands on the stereo. Now, these computer scientists in Finland have turned this habit into real music with an air guitar that really makes some sounds.

How Does It Work?

To make things even better, the technology is kind of totally invisible. The gloves that you've got to wear are just a couple of standard orange gardening gloves. As you are playing ( or in my case, learn how to play air guitar ), a web camera that's programmed to see only the orange color will watch your gloves and track their movement. In realtime, software engineered to recognize gestures will interpret your hand movement into sounds. When you'll be moving your hand down the fret board, the sound will go higher, as if you were playing a genuine guitar. It truly feels and sounds as if you were basically playing.

What Can You Actually Play?

Sure, you will not be in a position to do all you are able to do on a genuine guitar. You will not be ready to play songs like Staircase to Heaven on an air guitar. if it worked just like a genuine one, you would most likely have to spend months to be taught how to play air guitar. With an air guitar, you get to feel just like a rock guitar player inside a few seconds. The things you can do are limited though.

If you want to learn to play air guitar with Kinerva's technology, there are two models you can choose from: chord and solo mode. If you choose the chord mode, you will only be able to play four different chords. This is indeed limiting, but it's enough for playing the opening chords of songs like "Smoke on the Water" and other rock classics. With the solo mode, it will be as if you were running up and down a pentatonic scale, which is the standard key of rock guitar solos.

The smartest thing is that you cannot really play it badly. Regardless of how you are moving your hands and mixing chords and solo notes, it'll sound like you are playing something.

The full system works on a normal desktop PC. The inventors are now working on a Windows version and air guitar may sometime become as common as Game cubes or X-boxes. Who knows, perhaps it'll even provoke some people to sit and learn how to play a genuine guitar.

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