New analog musical instrument based on fiber-optic Brillouin scattering

[BBB POP]

Dear Team Magenta

 

I have developed new analog musical instrument using "optical fiber", "strong light", and "distributed measurement technique."

If you have a time, please watch the video in this website↓.

 

http://www.cntp.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/research-photonic-sensing/

 

This is the first demonstration of musical instrument based on Brillouin scattering in optical fibers using the slope-assisted Brillouin optical correlation-domain analysis with polarization maintaining fibers. The distributed measurement data was directly converted to the sound wave with a speaker. The timbre can be controlled by applying strain manually at any position. In the historical side of musical instrument based on optics, the linear optical phenomenon based musical instrument have been proposed in 1986 [1] and improved for actual performance in the stage [2], but the nonlinear optical phenomenon based musical instrument have not been proposed. I used one of nonlinear optical phenomenon (Brillouin scattering).

 

[1] S. J. Stecher,  "Low frequency laser fiberoptic detector apparatus for musical instruments and intrusion detection." U.S. Patent No. 4,321,463. 23 Mar. 1982.

[2] S. Avino, J. A. Barnes,  G. Gagliardi, X. Gu, D. Gutstein, J. R. Mester, and H. P. Loock, "Musical instrument pickup based on a laser locked to an optical fiber resonator," Opt. Exp. vol. 19 no. 25, pp. 25057-25065, Dec. 2011.

 

Best regards,

N. Hayashi