FaceOSC Lets You Use Your Face A Music Controller (Check This Out!)

FaceOSC is a new tool for prototyping face-based interaction. This video, via Kyle McDonald, demonstrates how it can be used to capture face movements and use the facial ‘gestures’ to control Propellerhead Reason.

McDonald notes that “Some of the “face gestures” (or metrics) are more stable than others. Lighting can also have a huge influence on the stability of your values: even lighting from the front coupled with a dark background can give the best results.”

FaceOSC comes as an example app with the ofxFaceTracker addon for openFrameworks.

You can download FaceOSC as an OSX binary at github (.zip). OSCulator – a program for routing OSC and MIDI – is available at osculator.net.

16 thoughts on “FaceOSC Lets You Use Your Face A Music Controller (Check This Out!)

  1. I'm always impressed with the technical skill and effort it takes to accomplish something like this, but I am never interested in using them because these sorts of options never offer enough real control to be useful or creatively different from what I can already easily do. After using a keyboard, guitar, bank of knobs, and keyboard/mouse, it's going to take something significant to offer a new advantage

  2. I think comparing this to more traditional control methods, keyboard, mouse, mod wheel what ever, isn’t right… Because IMO this is not well suited for situations where you would want precise control. However, creating control messages with your face opens up new possibilities when you want something more random and less precise. And sometimes that’s exactly what one needs… To break the chains of uniformity, to create something more chaotic.

  3. This seems like it would be interesting combined with a keyboard controller. Like ‘synth face’ suggested, your expressions could shape your synth sounds!

  4. As indicated below, this tool is not designed to replace traditional control surfaces or instruments. It joins the myriad other experiments in generating control signals from stochastic or even non-musically intended sources, be it solar wind data, the movement of ants in their environs, migration patterns of geese or what have you. Sonifying these structures is an interesting area for exploration, although it may not yield typical musical resuts.

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