I was thinking that finger muting wouldn’t be possible, because the sensors are physically damped and there’s no vibration left for your fingers to stop. Except now that you mention it, it might still be possible! It could be that gently placing your finger on one of them has a sufficiently recognizable signal that if it’s currently “vibrating” and you do that I could treat that as a mute signal.
Maybe you could reduce the damping, so that when muting you can feel your finger stopping the vibration? It seems to me that more feedback of this kind is usually a good thing for the player. Also the vibration could give you a continuous “envelope” signal to be used later.
I do think that would be possible, but then I think you’ll also get more false triggers. The strong damping is what makes it so I can sensitively detect a pluck on one tine without a strong pluck on one tine also triggering detection of a weak pluck on neighbor tines.
Crosstalk is definitely a problem, e-drums and pads have it too. But are you sure the tradeoff is inescapable? Imagine the tines sit on separate pads, or on the same pad but far from each other. (Or close to each other, but with deep grooves between them, so that the distance through the connecting material is large.) This thought experiment shows that damping and crosstalk can be small at the same time. So maybe you can reduce damping but not increase crosstalk, by changing the instrument’s shape or materials.
I do think it’s possible to have low crosstalk with low damping. The problem is that my current design uses the same rubber (sorbothane) pad for both purposes. Possibly this could be two layers, first sorbothane (for isolation) and then something springing (for minimal damping). Or an actual spring?
For similar instruments, you’ve seen the array mbira, right?
For marking the ends of notes, to me the most intuitive solution would be muting with fingers, but I’m not sure how that translates to electronics.
I was thinking that finger muting wouldn’t be possible, because the sensors are physically damped and there’s no vibration left for your fingers to stop. Except now that you mention it, it might still be possible! It could be that gently placing your finger on one of them has a sufficiently recognizable signal that if it’s currently “vibrating” and you do that I could treat that as a mute signal.
Maybe you could reduce the damping, so that when muting you can feel your finger stopping the vibration? It seems to me that more feedback of this kind is usually a good thing for the player. Also the vibration could give you a continuous “envelope” signal to be used later.
I do think that would be possible, but then I think you’ll also get more false triggers. The strong damping is what makes it so I can sensitively detect a pluck on one tine without a strong pluck on one tine also triggering detection of a weak pluck on neighbor tines.
Crosstalk is definitely a problem, e-drums and pads have it too. But are you sure the tradeoff is inescapable? Imagine the tines sit on separate pads, or on the same pad but far from each other. (Or close to each other, but with deep grooves between them, so that the distance through the connecting material is large.) This thought experiment shows that damping and crosstalk can be small at the same time. So maybe you can reduce damping but not increase crosstalk, by changing the instrument’s shape or materials.
I do think it’s possible to have low crosstalk with low damping. The problem is that my current design uses the same rubber (sorbothane) pad for both purposes. Possibly this could be two layers, first sorbothane (for isolation) and then something springing (for minimal damping). Or an actual spring?