Epipe

A musician’s performance is intimately bound up with their physical means of expression. The instrument constraints, but its unique character colours and informs the performance. Until now, much of the focus in musical interface design has concentrated on the keyboard. The wind and string communities have been particularly poorly served - the more ‘organic’ nature of their interaction with their instrument making it much harder to measure meaningfully.

The goal of this project is to develop a very palpable interface based on the Irish Uilleann Pipes, a polyphonic reeded woodwind with a complex (some might say bizarre) interface. The Epipe interface will use a combination of capacitive and optical sensing technologies to provide continuous tonehole control - an element missing from existing electronic woodwinds and essential for expressive performance - and output a set of parameters which may be used to drive physically-based instrument models in a performance context and ultimately to generate a MIDI control stream allowing it to be used with the huge base of existing music software.

Related Publications:

• Hughes, S. Cannon, C. O’Modhrain, S., (2004). “Epipe : A Novel Electronic Woodwind Controller” in proceedings of NIME’04, Hamamatsu, Japan
• Cannon, C., Hughes, S. & O’Modhrain, S., (2003). “EpipE: Exploration of the Uilleann Pipes as a potential controller for computer-based music” in proceedings of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME’03), Montreal, Canada

People:

• Cormac Cannon
• Stephen Hughes
• Sile O’Modhrain