The central role of the face in social interaction and non-verbal communication suggest we explore facial action as a means of musical expression. This paper presents the design, implementation, and preliminary studies of a novel system utilizing face detection and optic flow algorithms to associate facial movements with sound synthesis in a topographically specific fashion. We report on our experience with various gesture-to-sound mappings and applications, and describe our preliminary experiments at musical performance using the system.
['Mathias Funk', 'Kazuhiro Kuwabara', 'Michael J. Lyons']
Sonification of facial actions for musical expression