Possessing drums: An interface of musical instruments that assigns arbitrary timbres to personal belongings

Abstract

In this work, I propose an interface for musical instruments for assigning arbitrary timbres to arbitrary objects including personal belongings such as a table or cup, or actions such as vocalization by audio signal processing, to enable the users to play music as if they were playing the actual acoustic musical instrument which generates the simulated timbres. This system requires no special device, only a standard microphone. The assigned timbres are produced not by a triggered PCM (pulse-code modulation) waveform in response to the detected attacks in the microphone input source but by the modeling process of the system that generates the timbres by modifying the microphone input source itself. It thereby enables the users to play music with very sensitive expression, including very small sounds, fast passages, and the effects of playing style. Additionally, in this system, we can assign separate individual timbres to each of a set of objects at a time and play polyphonic music. © 2013 Information Processing Society of Japan.