The Stingray embedded acoustic instrument

Abstract

Many traditional acoustic musical instruments are convenient to use: a performer picks one up, provides an energetic excitation, and the resulting sound radiates immediately. No wires, protocols, or software updates are ever required. The same cannot be said for the vast majority of prior digital musical instruments. The present work addresses how to endow a digital musical instrument with the convenience, look, feel, and personality of a traditional acoustic musical instrument via enclosure prototyping techniques, audio amplification, and embedded computation. For example, the Stingray is an embedded acoustic instrument. Although its battery needs to be occasionally charged, it otherwise can give the impression of a traditional acoustic musical instrument. The control inputs for the Stingray include a piano keyboard and force-feedback motorized faders. The faders allow the performer to interact expressively with the sound, while the piano keyboard enables the precise selection of notes. If desired, the Stingray can be programmed using physical models, including models of hypothetical acoustic instruments that would be infeasible to build physically. In this configuration, the Stingray expressively transforms the performer's gestures into radiated sound in an energy-conserving manner.