Kinetic is for sale

23 Feb 2017
   

Posted by Khalemy No comments yet

The Kinetic application is for sale, and will provide its future owner with a fairly long list of features.

What is Kinetic?

The result of work started in early 2011, Kinetic analyzes guitar scores and transforms them to tablatures, with left hand and right hand annotations if so desired. It uses a search-space exploration algorithm, specifically tuned for music scores of plucked string instruments, which exploits various heuristics and real-life information from guitar playing culture to deliver a high-performance and high-validity result. For example, a 2-page score is typically processed in 300 to 400 milliseconds, which although impressive in and of itself can be improved, all the more since the entire code surrounding the optimized algorithm is not... optimized. The point here is that there is ample room for improvement performance-wise.

Features

Kinetic is capable of dealing with not only guitars but also other plucked string instruments. It supports a number of strings ranging from 4 to 7, with provisions for extending that number. The layout of the fretboard and the tuning are fully parameterized, and the biomechanical constraints applying over the fretting hand can be relaxed or reinforced at will.

The input format is currently MusicXML 3, which is then mapped to an internal interface that abstracts details of the input format. It is therefore straightforward to support another input format by writing an appropriate adapter that maps that format to the internal abstraction.

Likewise, the output format is standard tablature text file, but the same abstraction design is in place. The source code actually implements two other output formats.

Other usage

In 2014–2016, Kinetic has been used to provide input data to another internal project, named Kantabile, which was a proof-of-concept program demonstrating the possibility for a 3D character to play any piece of guitar music in an interactive setting, with the user/viewer pausing the performance, slowing it down, or moving orbit cameras around the virtual player. Kantabile was built with Unity3D and features inverse kinematic computation for a natural placement of the character's limbs.

Why sell?

The sale of Kinetic is the result of coming to grips with two facts:

  1. Khalemy is not equipped with the resource, other than intellectual, to push this piece of software to the market and have it make the impact that it has the potential of making. Another company with a larger team is more fit to do so. The research was done in-house but the actual opening to the world can be done outside the birthplace.
  2. The activity of Khalemy has pivoted away from music-learning tools to language-learning tools and there are other projects in this latter field that would benefit from the funding that selling Kinetic would provide.

Interested?

For more information, please use the contact form or the contact information you may already have.


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