Time

Bea

ts P

er M

inut

e (B

PM

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Bridge

Pitch/BPM Shifting During A Bridge

Music Morpher was a final year project created by : Paul Holloway, Kieran Smith & Jonathan Walton

Supervised by : Peter Kenny (P.G.Kenny@Kent.ac.uk)

Project Background

Design a visually stunning and functionally powerful system which can effectively morph dance tracks using technologies and techniques far beyond that possible using standard analogue equipment.

Built to support a range of users, from a home user with an interest in mixing music, to professional musicians and DJ’s.

Provide a simple, one-click approach to morphing entire playlists of songs.

Technologies Implemented & The Solution

Java Sound API - Extensive use of the Java Sound API to provide low level access to the digital audio.

Waveform Processor, Low Pass Filters & Normalisation – Implemented to provide powerful processing of digital audio used throughout the system within the automatic algorithms and also for the visual waveforms.

Start / End Point Detection - Good Start and End points are required for an effective morph and bridge period, therefore an automatic search algorithm has been implemented to make this process easy for the user whilst also allowing manual manipulation via a specifically designed user interface.

BPM (Beat’s Per Minute) Detection - Beat rates are required for successful morphing therefore we have implemented both an automatic algorithm and two techniques for manual beat detection/calculation.

Digital Audio Manipulation within the Morph Process – When generating bridges between tracks, several techniques were used : Incremental beat rate increase/decrease, smooth cross fading between tracks, automatic bridge start/end correction and finally bass cuts. Together these provide a powerful and effective mix.

Internal Meta Data – Xerces XML DOM parser used to read and store meta data about various tracks used within the system and also within the load/save process of playlists.

Custom Music Morpher Player – Providing all the required functionality of a music player, Music Morpher includes a player interface which is linked into the entire system.

GUI / GUI Handler / Controller / Service Framework – Used in business projects to separate the application logic into a series of layers to support easy development and extensibility of the system.