Bored out of my mind while Hannah was out of town, I found an incredibly striking tool: An application that automatically produces stepfiles for Dance Dance Revolution from almost any song*. Originally a student’s project while at Imperial College London, it’s now a publicly available open-source program.

[*] For the best results, according the student’s report, the song must have a beat, preferably computer generated (Human drummers aren’t precise enough for DDR), have no tempo changes, and must be from 1 to 2 minutes. This stuff isn’t really too much of a problem, considering all DDR music is like this ~_~

It’s amazing in that it calculates the BPM, time from song start to arrow start, and arranges the arrows in a physically possible and danceable pattern all without any human involvement. It’s not perfect: the steps are a bit too easy, and the arrows usually start too early in the song, but it nonetheless manages to create good stepfiles without requiring tweaking.

The utility even manages to place freeze arrows appropriately and detects dramatic pauses in the song. I’d like to try editing a step file the program produces to try to improve the steps just a wee bit. Honestly, the grunt work of producing a stepfile may be the best use of the program.

Download and learn about the program at the Dancing Monkeys wiki, or read the student’s final report [pdf] (Quite interesting if you are a music or programming geek, talks alot about machine processing of music theory and whatnot. Worth at least a skim for the pretty pictures.)