A portable multi-pitch e-drum based on printed flexible pressure sensors

Pressure sensors are ideal candidates for implementing portable digital music instruments. Existing commercial pressure sensors, however, are not optimized to meet both timing and precision requirements for acoustic uses. In this paper, we demonstrate a portable multi-pitch electronic drum (e-drum) system based on large-area (> 15cm in diameter) ring-shaped pressure sensors made with low-cost screen-printing process. This e-drum system, which can accurately generate six different pitches of sounds in the current prototype, has the following key advantages: 1) a light-weight, flexible, bendable, and robust human-instrument interface, 2) real-time sound responses, 3) comparable acoustic sound quality with the conventional drums, and 4) easily expandable to a much larger number of sound-pitches. The digital music synthesis is implemented using a TI-DSP board and can be easily re-configured to realize other percussion instruments such as pianos and xylophones. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first successful demonstration of a portable e-drum based on large-area ring-shaped flexible sensors, whose success could open up many new applications.