WHAT:
Roberto Aimi:
"Percussion Using Sampled Acoustics"

WHEN:
Monday, October 23, 2006 10:00am

WHERE:
Bartos Theatre, MIT Media Lab (E15)

WEBCAST:
http://www.media.mit.edu/events/movies/video.php?id=roberto-2006-10-23
The link will become active on the date and time scheduled for this event.

DISSERTATION COMMITTEE:
Tod Machover
Professor of Music and Media
MIT Media Laboratory

Joseph A. Paradiso
Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
MIT Media Laboratory

Hiroshi Ishii
Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
MIT Media Laboratory

ABSTRACT:
This thesis presents a framework for creating hybrid digital-acoustic percussion instruments by combining extensions of existing signal processing techniques with specially designed semi-acoustic physical controllers. This work aims to provide greater realism to digital percussion, gaining much of the richness and understandability of acoustic instruments while preserving the flexibility of digital systems.

Conventional percussion controllers measure and convert the intensity of strikes into discrete trigger messages, but they also ignore the timbre of the hits and fail to track more ambiguous input. In this work, the continuous acoustic output of a struck physical object is processed to add the resonance of a sampled instrument. This is achieved by employing existing low-latency convolution algorithms which have been extended to give the player control over features such as damping, spectral flattening, nonlinear effects, and pitch.

One of the advantages of this approach is that light taps, scrapes, rubs, or stirring with brushes all take on a hybrid timbre of the real and sampled sound that is surprisingly realistic and controllable. Since part of its behavior is inherently acoustic, a player's intuition about interacting with physical objects can be applied to controlling it. The ability to transform the apparent acoustics of objects also suggests applications to non-musical contexts. For this thesis, Aimi has collaborated with percussionists to develop a range of instruments, to refine and extend the algorithmic and physical designs, and to determine successful models of interaction.