HELiX

April 1 - April 5, 2019

For this course MUSIC 220c I propose to design and implement an Augmented Flute that can act as a controller for a variety of music making and performance applications.

Motivation

Sensory Percussion by Sun House

In October of 2016 I attended the SF Music Tech Submit, discovering many new innovations and designs in the music tech industry. However, Sensory Percussion by Sun House stood out the most to me. The idea was to have the ability to play and trigger electronic sounds and samples through the acoustic drum itself. No external drum pad was needed. This allowed drummers to explore electronic music production without having to go through the learning process of a whole new system or apparatus. They could intuitively and easily create electronic tracks and pieces based on their language and knowledge of playing the drums. An example of how the system works can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNASyYWshQc

After hearing a live demo of this system all I could think of was that I wanted one, but for my flute. So for this course I plan to design and build an augmented flute that will allow me to easily and intuitively create electronic music through my existing knowledge and facility of playing the flute.

April 8 - April 12, 2019

Requirements

This week I began laying out the requirements for HELiX:

1) Needs to respond to the keys being pressed on the flute in order to determine what note is being played. From there, different electronic samples or parameters can be mapped to it.

2) Need to be responsive to various articulations of the user (i.e. single, double and triple tonguing).

3) Needs to be wireless, with more than 80% of sensor and DSP processing being done on the micro-controllers connect to the flute.

4) Needs to be abled to be networked to different devices on a particular network or across the internet. This would allow a proof of concept that this system could eventually work in a large Internet of Things (IoT) system.

5) Needs to be self powered and rechargeable.

Articulation Studies

I started out by conducting several articulation studies of single and triple tonguing articulations. I recorded small snippets of my self playing concert flute and alto flute utilizing these articulations. The librosa library in python (https://librosa.github.io/librosa/) was used to perform the Harmonic and Percussive Source Separation (HPSS) on these recording. Below are examples of the resulting articulation spectrograms on concert flute:

Here are some examples of the alto-flute articulation spectrograms and how they relate to onset detection graphs in librosa: