Piano Crossing – Walking on a Keyboard

Piano Crossing is an interactive art installation which turns a pedestrian crossing marked with white stripes into a piano keyboard so that pedestrians can generate music by walking over it. Matching tones are created when a pedestrian steps on a particular stripe or key. A digital camera is directed at the crossing from above. A special computer vision application was developed, which maps the stripes of the pedestrian crossing to piano keys and detects by means of an image over which key the center of gravity of each pedestrian is placed at any given moment. Black stripes represent the black piano keys. The application consists of two parts: (1) initialization, where the model of the abstract piano keyboard is mapped to the image of the pedestrian crossing, and (2) the detection of pedestrians at the crossing, so that musical tones can be generated according to their locations. The art installation Piano crossing was presented to the public for the first time during the 51st Jazz Festival in Ljubljana in July 2010.