The field of the invention is music instruments and human interaction devices
An aerophone is any musical instrument which produces sound primarily by causing a body of air to vibrate, without the use of strings or membranes, and without the vibration of the instrument itself adding considerably to the sound. It is one of the four main classes of instruments in the original Hornbostel-Sachs scheme of musical instrument classification. The traditional way of playing aerophone instruments is to create airflow and dynamically modify certain properties of the instrument which cause its air column to vibrate at different resonant frequencies. As a result of that the instrument produces its output in the form of periodic acoustic waveform with different frequencies. The airflow produced can be both constant as in bagpipes or dynamic as in flute or clarinet.
The method proposed in this invention aims at providing alternative for using aerophone instruments without creating airflow and without generating acoustic output directly from the instrument.
There are known methods for achieving that. A common method for producing electronic practice instruments is to install buttons inside the finger holes of the instrument. This solution is acceptable only for very basic practice instruments since it can not reproduce the complex characteristics of the real instrument.
The disclosed embodiments take a different approach and describe method based on continuous estimation of the impulse response function of the acoustic system of the instrument and mathematical model that is used to produce the output signal of the instrument.
The generality of such method allows for it to be used not only in music instruments but also in other applications as in human interaction devices where the state of the acoustic system of an object the user interacts with can be identified and used as input.
The proposed method combines ideas from the fields of signal processing and acoustics.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds