Performance with an Electronically Excited Didgeridoo

Abram Hindle, and Daryl Posnett

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

The didgeridoo is a wind instrument composed of a single large tube often used as drone instrument for backing up the mids and lows of an ensemble. A didgeridoo is played by buzzing the lips and blowing air into the didgeridoo. To play a didgeridoo continously one can employ circular breathing but the volume of air required poses a real challenge to novice players. In this paper we replace the expense of circular breathing and lip buzzing with electronic excitation, thus creating an electro-acoustic didgeridoo or electronic didgeridoo. Thus we describe the didgeridoo excitation signal, how to replicate it, and the hardware necessary to make an electro-acoustic didgeridoo driven by speakers and controllable from a computer. To properly drive the didgeridoo we rely upon 4th-order ported bandpass speaker boxes to help guide our excitation signals into an attached acoustic didgeridoo. The results somewhat replicate human didgeridoo playing, enabling a new kind of mid to low electro-acoustic accompaniment without the need for circular breathing.

Citation:

Abram Hindle, and Daryl Posnett. 2017. Performance with an Electronically Excited Didgeridoo. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1176228

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{ahindle2017,
 abstract = {The didgeridoo is a wind instrument composed of a single large tube often used as drone instrument for backing up the mids and lows of an ensemble. A didgeridoo is played by buzzing the lips and blowing air into the didgeridoo. To play a didgeridoo continously one can employ circular breathing but the volume of air required poses a real challenge to novice players. In this paper we replace the expense of circular breathing and lip buzzing with electronic excitation, thus creating an electro-acoustic didgeridoo or electronic didgeridoo. Thus we describe the didgeridoo excitation signal, how to replicate it, and the hardware necessary to make an electro-acoustic didgeridoo driven by speakers and controllable from a computer. To properly drive the didgeridoo we rely upon 4th-order ported bandpass speaker boxes to help guide our excitation signals into an attached acoustic didgeridoo. The results somewhat replicate human didgeridoo playing, enabling a new kind of mid to low electro-acoustic accompaniment without the need for circular breathing.  },
 address = {Copenhagen, Denmark},
 author = {Abram Hindle and Daryl Posnett},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1176228},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 pages = {222--226},
 publisher = {Aalborg University Copenhagen},
 title = {Performance with an Electronically Excited Didgeridoo},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2017/nime2017_paper0041.pdf},
 year = {2017}
}