Students score a hit with music software
- Published: 21/04/2010 at 12:00 AM
- Newspaper section: Database
Four students from Khon Kaen University's Faculty of Engineering have risen to the challenge presented by Microsoft Thailand to help the Royal Institute of Thailand develop a next-generation musical encyclopedia.
Panupong Sritananun, right, and Thiwakorn Faengrit, left, touch the display on the virtual piano in the Musical Encyclopedia.
The team, which consists of Thiwakorn Faengrit, Panupong Sritananun, Kitipong Intaboot and Chinnapat Assadayudh, joined the internship program at the Microsoft Innovation Center to learn new developing skills such as Java and the C# programming language.
Thiwakorn said the team leveraged Multi-Touch technology in Windows 7 when designing Musical Encyclopedia, an interactive program which helps users to learn basic knowledge of music instrument components through narration.
A touch display also allows users to rotate images of instruments through 360 degrees, as well as listen to sounds and notes from the model.
The team chose the piano and drum as the first two instruments to be features in the encyclopedia and developed the computing of the program inside four weeks.
The software allows users to virtually touch and play the music instrument, while at the same time helping users to gain a greater understanding of details through the use of interactive elements, which are more effective than traditional media formats.
The team is planning to add further musical instruments to the encyclopedia themselves, as well as boosting the content by opening the interface to other developers to add more instruments.
Ekaraj Kongswangwongsa, Software Industry Development Manager at Microsoft (Thailand), added that this project should inspire other students and younger people to develop their own software, as it will show that attaining such skills is not as difficult as it may appear.
Microsoft Thailand plans to encourage the Royal Institute to extend and enhance the software so it can be distributed and published more widely, especially in school libraries.
The company gave full intellectual property rights to the program to the team and is displaying their work to the public at the Microsoft Experience Gallery in IT Mall Fortune City as one of its multi-touch technology applications.
"This might not be the first virtual music program but it is the first to use multi-touch technology to bring knowledge closer to mainstream users," Ekaraj said.
Relate Search: Khon Kaen University's Faculty of Engineering, Microsoft Thailand, Royal Institute of Thailand, Musical Encyclopedia
About the author
- Writer: Suchit Leesa-nguansuk
- Position: Reporter
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