Have you ever heard that if you are passionate about engineering, you live outside the art world and vice versa? Well, nothing is further from the truth. The story of David Baylies , an engineering student at Boston University, is a good example of this.
In 2016, Baylies, who had studied music throughout her life, decided to focus her summer project on the University Research Opportunities Program (UROP) in an interdisciplinary way. It pairs students with mentors from the faculty and provides funding for them to carry out their projects. In this way, Baylies managed to reconcile his passion for mechanical engineering, acoustics and Miles Davis making everything fit together perfectly.
Baylies became interested in jazz when he was nothing more than a teenager and lived surrounded by instruments: an electric guitar, an electric bass, an electric keyboard and sound amplifiers. He also had what had always been his main instrument: an old trumpet .
And if there was something that made this student desperate, it was not having managed to find an electric trumpet that would satisfy the sound that he liked to recreate with it. Despite there being several of these instruments on the market, Baylies considered that, in general, the notes they emitted lacked the characteristic personality of the musician when blowing the metal mouthpiece: they were too perfect.
So he set out to design the electric trumpet that, for him, would serve his purposes. And, removing the mouthpiece – made of plastic – created from a 3D printer, the rest of the instrument would look like anything but a trumpet. It is, on the contrary, a set of green circuits with a surface area smaller than a playing card. The bottom layer is the main processor board, a Teensy 3.2 ; the top layer contains a microphone, an audio input adapter, and a headphone jack.
A single output connects the device to a computer, where the data runs through the Garage Band music program, and the output to a Peavey amplifier. Thus, sound is sampled 44 100 times per second and is translated into data. And this time yes, you can give nuances to the sound, as many as you want. More even than with a trumpet of a lifetime.
The Teensy processor takes the data from the mouthpiece and the three trumpet valves through the microphone, analyzes them and converts the key variables into data for MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). By choosing the correct variables, Baylies is finally able to produce the faithful sound of a trumpet.
