A Gesturally Controlled Virtual Musical Instruments for Chinese Guqin

Abstract

Guqin is a kind of Chinese seven-string bridgeless zither with a history of more than 3000 years. This paper describes the design and implementation of a novel virtual Guqin application, based on Kinect sensor, aiming to arouse user‘s interest in Guqin. The player’s gestures are tracked, and when the system generates the data and feeds it back to the audio library, the performance is complete. Players can engage in the charm of the virtual instrument through natural interaction without being restricted by domain knowledge, equipment or site. Finally, this paper carried out a user study to prove that this system has a significant performance in enhancing the interest of players.