THE PIPE: Explorations with breath control

Abstract

The Pipe is an experimental, general purpose music input device designed and built in the form of a compact MIDI wind controller. The development of this device was motivated in part by an interest in exploring breath pressure as a control input. The Pipe provides a variety of common sensor types, including force sensing resistors, momentary switches, accelerometers, potentiometers, and an air pressure transducer, which allow maximum flexibility in the design of a sensor mapping scheme. The Pipe uses a programmable BASIC Stamp 2sx microprocessor which outputs control messages via a standard MIDI jack.