A few weeks ago the team spoke at the VSA annual violin-making conference in Cleveland, Ohio. We made some new friends and demoed our new and improved electric violin prototype. As always, there are things to work on, but we are in a much better place than we were in June when we showed our previous prototype.

Here’s an image of Joseph Curtin testing the new prototype.

Here is John Bell explaining how our system recreates directional tone color.

This is me giving an hour-long talk about rapid manufacturing and instrument making.

In my last post I mentioned that I was going to be speaking at the Violin Society of America’s Violin Acoustics Workshop at Oberlin College. My talk on electric violin design went well, and I am happy to report that I had an excellent experience at the conference. I learned some new things about violin acoustics, met some interesting new people, and caught up with some people that I met at last year’s workshop. And most importantly, I am very excited about some of the opportunities that the conference has brought. Here are a few photographs and highlights from the event.

The first image, from left to right, is of the violin maker and researcher George Stoppani. He is explaining how the bridge modal analysis process works to one of the Oberlin attendees. I do not yet have the results of that experiment, but I will post them I soon as I get them from George.

The second image is of Amit Zoran, a PhD student from the MIT Media Lab, presenting to the group on his Chameleon Guitar. Amit and I had some wonderful conversations about our projects, designs, and processes. I highly encourage everyone to check out his excellent work.

The last two images are of Joseph Curtin and Aaron Boyd trying out our Digital Violin Prototype. Joseph, as you know, works on the project, while Aaron Boyd is a profession violin player and the Concertmaster for the Tucson Symphony Orchestra. We still have a ways to go with the digital violin project, but the initial reaction was great, as evidenced by the video below of Aaron playing the instrument for the first time.

The summer is over, and Gabi Weinreich, Joseph Curtin, John Bell, and I have Returned from our various summer hideaways to reconvene in Ann Arbor. Our early fall meetings have yielded some stimulating new ideas, and a clearer, more exciting vision of our digital violin’s form and function has crystallized. One development in particular shows tremendous research potential: a method to include active feedback, which will allow us to alter the instrument’s feel and playability on the fly. Implementing such a mechanism could produce many innovative practical applications as well as valuable research opportunities, and we are excited to explore these in the coming months.

Creating an electric violin capable of sounding like a high-quality acoustic instrument (e.g. Stradvarius, Guarneri del Gesu, or Amati) is a difficult task, one which has not yet been achieved on a marketable scale. Over the summer, John Bell has worked hard to program a proof of concept which will test our approach to synthesizing the sound of an acoustic violin. He is using an FPGA board to prototype and will design custom hardware once programming is finalized.

My efforts have been divided among several areas. While creating production-quality 3D models of certain essential areas of the violin, I have also worked to design more efficient bridges. Moreover, I have devoted substantial energy to the visualization and development of numerous design concepts for the digital violin. The recent evolution of the project has dramatically altered the technical requirements of the instrument, however, so most of these designs will need to be scrapped or greatly adapted. All in all, though, things are coming together well. I look forward to our continued progress on the project.

Above, left: the team (left to right: Joseph Curtin, John Bell, Alex Sobolev, Gabi Weinreich); right: the FPGA board.