The Development of the !trumpet

Abstract

The !trumpet is software synthesis system controlled from, and playing back through, a trumpet.  It is not an electronically extended trumpet: the player produces no acoustic sounds by blowing through the mouthpiece. Instead, breath pressure and valve movement on the brass instrument are read by an embedded Arduino microcontroller  and sent to a laptop, where the data is mapped onto various parameters in synthesis software; the resulting electronic sound is returned to the trumpet, where it plays through a loudspeaker inside the bell, and is further processed acoustically by valve position (changes in the length of tubing filter the speaker output), movement of a plunger mute (wah-wah style filtering), and orientation of the instrument in space (panning).