A DMI Proposal: The Boop

This post lays out a proposal of a new hypothetical digital musical instrument I’m calling the Boop. I’ll discuss it as if it’s already been made to avoid using the future tense everywhere. I’ll try and find time to make this a reality soon, this just serves to get all of my thoughts in one place.

Overview

The Boop is a very simple instrument: a single finger drumming pad that uses a combination of microphones to output both MIDI and audio. For MIDI, it performs impulse detection on the microphone signals to trigger note on/off messages. The instrument uses a piezoelectric disc which acts as a contact microphone as well as a traditional hobby electronics capsule microphone. The mono audio output is a mix between the two microphone signals controlled by a knob. All of this will be enclosed in a small laser-cut wooden box with small holes in the surface, producing a simple, low-cost instrument that only uses a few parts to encourage attainability and replicability.

And that’s about it! The intent is to have a nice small surface recording pad that will encourage experimentation by musicians to explore using new materials, objects and interactions for their sound design. For example, placing dead leaves on the pad might produce inspiring new sounds when tapped or moved around, and the audio could be combined with the MIDI triggers to make hybrid drum samples! Check out a diagram of the Boop in Figure 1.

Figure 1. A simple diagram of the Boop internals and appearance.

More to come soon on this!