Keyboard-type optical fiber musical interface

Abstract

Musical instruments are complex multimodal interfaces combining audiovisual information and motivating researchers to design intuitive and creative ways of communication between the user and the digital system. We demonstrated a musical interface based on an optical fiber specklegram sensor (FSS) for one octave of C major scale. The setup comprises a laser source and a camera connected by a multimode optical fiber cable with foam pads marking the notes. The software recovers the pressed key by computing the cross-correlation coefficient between the immediate speckle pattern and the reference images from prior calibration, estimating their similarity, and taking the closest option as the output. Simultaneously, the software plays the identified key with a sound synthesizer. The experiments validated the proposed interface to play the calibrated notes, independent of the input sequence, with a response delay within 0.5 s, for a single fiber cable and further discuss the possibility of playing chords. With the musical interface processing the positional information of external stimuli, it simplifies the hardware configuration and allows different techniques of musical expression.

Pipe Organ Design Including the Passive Haptic Feedback Technology and Measurement Analysis of Key Displacement, Pressure Force and Sound Organ Pipe

“…Nowadays, the keyboard instrument is most strictly associated with the piano and digital keyboards, where the musical notes are defined by their initiation and release with the control of speed and time [1,2]. The piano's sound and noise play a crucial role as do the different key-pressing techniques as confirmed by several studies [3][4][5].The relationship between the pianists' finger movements and characteristics of the resulting sound in terms of the time and intensity of tones during the performance is proposed as a multiple force feedback keyboard or as virtual simulations to reproduce the feeling of a grand piano [6,7]. For the musician, playing an instrument is an activity that involves an acoustic sense and, in addition, is a multi-sensory activity, providing essential visual and haptic feedback information [8,9].…”