Hydraulophone design considerations: Absement, displacement, and velocity-sensitive music keyboard in which each key is a water jet

Proceedings of the 14th annual Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) international conference on Multimedia, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, Pages 519-528, 2006, ISBN:1-59593-447-2 Authors: ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGMULTIMEDIA: ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia
Publisher: ACM Press, New York, NY, USA

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BibTex bibliographic information

@inproceedings{1180751,
 author = {Steve Mann and Ryan Janzen and Mark Post},
 title = {Hydraulophone design considerations: Absement, displacement, and
          velocity-sensitive music keyboard in which each key is a water jet},
 booktitle = {MULTIMEDIA '06: Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM international
             conference on Multimedia},
 year = {2006},
 isbn = {1-59593-447-2},
 pages = {519--528},
 location = {Santa Barbara, CA, USA},
 doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1180639.1180751},
 publisher = {ACM Press},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
}



ABSTRACT

   We present a musical keyboard that is not only velocity-sensitive, but
   in fact responds to absement (presement), displacement (placement),
   velocity, acceleration, jerk, jounce, etc. (i.e. to all the
   derivatives, as well as the integral, of displacement).Moreover,
   unlike a piano keyboard in which the keys reach a point of maximal
   displacement, our keys are essentially infinite in length, and thus
   never reach an end to their key travel. Our infinite length keys are
   achieved by using water jet streams that continue to flow past the
   fingers of a person playing the instrument. The instrument takes the
   form of a pipe with a row of holes, in which water flows out of each
   hole, while a user is invited to play the instrument by interfering
   with the flow of water coming out of the holes. The instrument
   resembles a large flute, but, unlike a flute, there is no complicated
   fingering pattern. Instead, each hole (each water jet) corresponds to
   one note (as with a piano or pipe organ). Therefore, unlike a flute,
   chords can be played by blocking more than one water jet hole at the
   same time. Because each note corresponds to only one hole, different
   fingers of the musician can be inserted into, onto, around, or near
   several of the instrument's many water jet holes, in a variety of
   different ways, resulting in an ability to independently control the
   way in which each note in a chord sounds.Thus the hydraulophone
   combines the intricate embouchure control of woodwind instruments with
   the polyphony of keyboard instruments.Various forms of our instrument
   include totally acoustic, totally electronic, as well as hybrid
   instruments that are acoustic but also include an interface to a
   multimedia computer to produce a mixture of sounds that are produced
   by the acoustic properties of water screeching through orific plates,
   as well as synthesized sounds.


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