fourms / mgt-terminal

Musical Gestures Toolbox for doing various video-related tricks in the terminal

MGT-terminal

The Musical Gestures Toolbox for Terminal is made for doing various video-related tricks in the terminal. The toolbox builds on the other Musical Gestures Toolboxes (for Max, Matlab, Python). All of these scripting-based toolboxes are slightly different in implementation, but they share the vision of creating powerful, yet fairly simple to use, operations for video visualization.

MGT for Terminal is based on the power of FFmpeg and ImageMagick.

Installation

Download and extract the zip-file, or clone to where you want the toolbox:

git clone https://github.com/fourMs/MGT-terminal.git

You need to have FFmpeg and ImageMagick for it to work. On Ubuntu, these can be installed in the terminal like this:

sudo apt install ffmpeg imagemagick

On other systems you may have to download through the links above.

Tutorial

Please check the wiki.

History

This toolbox was first developed to test how FFmpeg could be used to create various types of video visualizations. This was the basis for the development of MGT for Python. The Python version if much more complete, but the Terminal version is handy for various types of bash scripting.

The software is maintained by the fourMs lab at RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion at the University of Oslo.

Reference

This toolbox has not been published on, but you could reference one of these publications for info about the functionality:

• Laczkó, B., & Jensenius, A. R. (2021). Reflections on the Development of the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python. Proceedings of the Nordic Sound and Music Computing Conference.
• Jensenius, Alexander Refsum (2018). The Musical Gestures Toolbox for Matlab. Proceedings of the 19th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Late Breaking Demos Session. Paris, France.
• Jensenius, Alexander Refsum (2013). Some Video Abstraction Techniques for Displaying Body Movement in Analysis and Performance. Leonardo 46, no. 1: 53--60.