Microphone-based electronic wind instrument by feature extraction from breath signals

An electronic wind instrument is an analog or digital electronic instrument actuated by blowing onto an electronic sensor. Through the history of electronic wind instruments, the refinement of the physical interfaces has not been followed by major innovations regarding breath and embouchure detection: the industry is still largely relying on pressure sensors for measuring air flow. We argue that many sound production techniques for acoustic wind instruments depend on breath quality in addition to breath quantity, and that most of the commercially available electronic options do not account for this. A series of breath signal measurements indicated that an electret microphone flush-mounted in a plastic tube is a suitable sensor for feature extraction of the player's breath. Therefore, we propose the implementation of an electronic wind instrument, which captures the envelope and frequency content of the breath and detects whether the signal is voiced or unvoiced. These features are mapped to the parameters of an FM synthesizer, with an external MIDI keyboard providing pitch control. A simple evaluation shows that the proposed implementation is able to capture the intended signal features, and that these translate well into the character of the output signal. A short performance was recorded to demonstrate that our instrument is potentially suitable for live applications. © Proceedings of the 15th Sound and Music Computing .