#57 Mechanical Sound Synthesis: And the New Application of Force-Feedback Teleoperation of Acoustic Musical Instruments
Edgar Berdahl, Julius Smith III, Gunter Niemeyer
In Mechanical Sound Synthesis, real mechanical devices are employed to create sound. Users can interact directly with the variables of the sound synthesis, making interactions more intuitive to both users and audience. We focus on real-time feedback control for Mechanical Sound Synthesis and provide a classification scheme using the reality-virtuality continuum. We discover an apparently novel paradigm, which is described as augmented virtuality for real-time feedback control. Exploring this paradigm, we present preliminary results from a system enabling a user to teleoperate acoustic percussion instruments with the aid of force feedback. Mechanical looping of the teleoperation trajectories and their transformations enables the synthesis of lifelike sounds with superhuman characteristics that are nevertheless produced by mechanical devices.
