Hello! I hope this blog finds you well! Pleased to meet you!

My name is Daniel Tsui and I am currently a double major student studying Bachelor in Computer Science and Master of Music in Violin Performance.  I have recently graduated from my Bachelor of Music in Violin Performance program at UBC!

At the age of four, I started learning the violin and from there on, I continued to pursue music as I really enjoyed music itself as a form of art. I also genuinely believe that music heals the mind and soul!

I enjoy playing all types of music and love to combine music and technology together. I have been heavily involved with the Music Technology program offered at the UBC School of Music. This is not what you would typically hear in a concert hall as we are experimenting with new, interactive music. We aim create many interactive pieces and create augmented instruments that allow us to manipulate the sounds and effects through sensor data. Sometimes the audience can also contribute to the piece in real-time from their seat as well! The interactive pieces we create integrate many of the previous projects we have created ourselves. A few examples — KiCASS (Kinect Controlled Artistic Sensing System) where we track dancers through the Kinect sensor which in turn gives us skeletal data of each of the joints of the dancer in real-time.  RUBS (Responsive User Body Suits) is where we explored e-textile clothing where we enable body suits to have custom circuitry to receive positional data in real-time. We can then take all this real-time data and apply it towards our effects and our custom programs to trigger and manipulate certain aspects of the piece. The sky really is the limit!

I hope this gives you a brief introduction about myself and my research work in my areas of interest!