A novel continuous pitch electronic wind instrument controller

Abstract

We present a design for an electronic continuous pitch wind controller for musical performance. It uses a combination of linear position, magnetic reed, and air pressure sensors to generate three fully continuous control dimensions. Each control dimension is encoded and transmitted using the industry standard MIDI protocol to allow the instrument to interface with a large variety of synthesizers to control different parameters of the synthesis algorithm in real time, allowing for a high degree of expressiveness not possible with existing electronic wind instrument controllers. The first part of the thesis will provide a justification for the design of a novel instrument, and present some of the theory behind pitch representation, encoding, and transmission with respect to digital systems. The remainder of the thesis will present the particular design and explain the workings of its various subsystems