Automated motion synthesis for dancing characters

In this paper, we present a technique to automatically synthesize dancing motions for arbitrary songs with dance beats. Our technique is based on analysing a musical tune (can be a song or melody) and synthesizing a motion for the virtual character where the character's movement synchronizes to the musical beats. In order to analyse beats of the tune, we developed a fast algorithm. Our motion synthesis algorithm analyses library of stock motions and generates new sequences of movements that were not described in the library. We show that our motion synthesis algorithm is better than previous dance generation techniques. We also present two algorithms to synchronize dance moves and musical beats: a fast greedy algorithm, and a genetic algorithm. Our experimental results show that we can generate new sequences of dance figures in which the dancer reacts to music and dances in synchronization with the music. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.