More Expressive
The Details
An “expressive” instrument helps you share your feelings through subtle changes in the characteristics of a sound, the same way your “tone of voice” can change the emotional meaning of your words. The more “degrees of freedom” (DoF) [1] a musical instrument has, the more expressive it is.
A human arm is considered to have 7 DoF. A shoulder gives pitch (up and down, hinge joint), yaw (back and forth, swerving) and roll (rotation about the axis). An elbow allows for pitch, and a wrist allows for pitch, yaw and roll. Only 3 of those movements would be necessary to move the hand to any point in space.
A thummer provides up to seven DoF – more than any other polyphonic musical instrument (that is, an instrument which can play more than one note at a time).
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The thumb-operated joysticks have similar mobility to the human shoulder and wrist. Each thum-stick has two DoF- technically, that's four degrees of freedom. The left thum-stick controls brightness (muting/muffling) and expression (instrument volume). The right thum-stick controls portomento (sliding between two notes), modulation (a quavering or pulsating effect produced in an instrumental by minute and rapid variations in pitch) and pitch (which can be bent up or down).
~ It also has two control-voltage jacks, into which one can plug foot pedals, breath controllers, bagpipe bags, or any compatible electronic devices. Each jack provides one DoF. (That’s six so far.)
~ It has 114 buttons (the thummer has separate buttons for sharps and flats of each note, unlike the piano for instance, which , each of which is an independent pressure sensor, in effect providing another DoF per note played. Because the expressive effect of polyphony is addressed below, this per-note DoF will only be counted as only one additional DoF. (That's seven DoF, total.)
A thummer can interpret the data emitted by each of its pressure-sensing buttons as:
~ On or off – like on an organ or a cheap electronic keyboard;
~ Key velocity – that is, striking speed, like on a drum or piano (some electronic keyboards with this feature are called “touch-sensitive”);
~ Channel pressure – that is, the average pressure across all currently-pressed buttons, as implemented on some high-end keyboard synthesisers; or
~ Polyphonic after-touch – that is, the independent pressure of each currently-pressed button, as implemented on only very few highest-quality keyboard synthesisers.
[1] For every “degree of freedom” (DoF), one expressive variable can be modified without affecting any other variable. If each variable has (for example) 100 possible values, then a controller with one DoF can select among 100 states. Two DoF delivers 100 x 100 = 10,000 possible states, whereas three DoF delivers 100 x 100 x 100 = 1,000,000 (one million) possible states. (Comparing to the human arm, you can move you wrist up and down approximately 180 degrees. So you can vary the position of your wrist vertically anywhere between 0 and 180 degrees. But then you can also move your wrist to and fro approximately 50 degrees, which means you can vary the wrist horizontally between 0 and 50 degrees. This means you have up to 180 x 50 = 9000 different positions for your wrist).
[2] The electric guitar’s tone wheels, whammy bar, pickup lever, and/or amp controls can be manipulated in between notes or during a sustained note or chord – but only one of these controls can be manipulated at a time, and no additional notes can be played by the hand doing such tone-control manipulation, so these actions aren’t independent of the others. Therefore, these controls do not contribute to the electric guitar’s DoF, any more than the knobs and dials on an electronic music synthesizer or computer software synth contribute to the thummer’s DoF.
Comparisons
A musician playing a piano-style keyboard controller can either add expressive effects (with the pitch bend or mod wheels) or play accompaniment – not both – because the musician’s entire left hand must be devoted to one task or the other. The thummer-player, however, can play accompaniment with the fingers and control expressive effects with the thumbs at the same time. Further, the thummer’s pair of thumb-operated joysticks provides twice the expressive power of a piano-style keyboard’s pair of wheels. Therefore, the thummer has the potential to be considerably more expressive than a piano-style keyboard controller.
A musician playing an electric guitar can bend or wiggle a string, press a continuous-effect foot pedal, pluck a string at a different location along its length (to emphasize different harmonics), and perform a couple of other effects all at the same time. The electric guitar therefore has four or perhaps five DoF. [2] Therefore, the thummer has the potential to be more expressive than the electric guitar.
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