UnitInstruments: Easy Configurable Musical Instruments

Musical instruments have a long history, and many types of musical instruments have been created to attain ideal sound production. At the same time, various types of electronic musical instruments have been developed. Since the main purpose of conventional electronic instruments is to duplicate the shape of acoustic instruments with no change in their hardware configurations, the diapason and the performance style of each instrument is inflexible. Therefore, the goal of our study is to construct the UnitInstrument that consists of various types of musical units. A unit is constructed by simulating functional elements of conventional musical instruments, such as output timing of sound and pitch decision. Each unit has connectors for connecting other units to create various types of musical instruments. Additionally, we propose a language for easily and flexibly describing the settings of units. We evaluated the effectiveness of our proposed system by using it in actual performances.