Rehearsal Assistant is a software tool which helps performance artists conduct rehearsals by addressing media-related needs.

The media-related needs for performance art rehearsals are diverse. In many settings, rehearsals are accompanied by pre-recorded music or sound. In addition, parts of rehearsals are often video recorded and later reviewed by the director and the cast. While watching a rehearsal run, the director or choreographer also records notes to be given to the cast (containing things such as advice or corrections).

In professional settings, such media needs are usually met by one or more human assistants which listen to verbal cues from the rehearsal director to start and stop music playback, start and stop the video recording, prepare video playback, or write down notes spoken by the director during the rehearsal run. In situations without dedicated assistants, the director must either coordinate everything by her or himself, or solicit help from the cast. In all these cases, the director, assistants and/or the cast are burdened with menial tasks which are not central to the creative process.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that the equipment used in the process is very diverse. For example, artists often use CD-players or portable music players for music playback, video cameras for video recording, possibly a TV for playback, and pen-and-paper for writing down notes. Each of these devices has a different interface and uses different storage for the media, which makes the use of the devices cumbersome and the organization of media difficult.

The goal of Rehearsal Assistant is to provide all of the above media services within a single software application that is simple to use and can control all required equipment.

The features that Rehearsal Assistant would offer can be categorized as follows:

Feature Category	Examples
Audio	preparation of audio/music tracks before rehearsal (track selection, cuing presets for relevant parts, tempo adjustment) playback during the rehearsal
Video	recording of rehearsals via a built-in or external camera playback of rehearsal videos streamlined sharing of videos through online repositories
Annotations	verbal annotations made by the rehearsal director can be recorded and synchronized with the corresponding sections of the rehearsal video recording annotations can be played back while replaying the video (additionally, a list of annotations is compiled and can be used to jump to specific parts of the recording) integration with MetaVidWiki for adding and viewing of text annotations through a web based interface, synchronized with the uploaded video recordings (some work to ease the uploading of video to MetaVidWiki is being proposed as a Google Summer of Code project)

Additionally, most of the above rehearsal-related functionality will be controllable through natural speech (e.g., using a wireless stage microphone) or a remote control device, in addition to the standard computer interfaces we are accustomed to today. This will make Rehearsal Assistant a reasonable stand-in for a human assistant that takes care of playing music, recording rehearsal runs, writing down notes given by the director, and other listed tasks.

Rehearsal Assistant is made possible by the support of p.a.v.e., the arts entrepreneurship program of the ASU School of Theatre and Film