Use Your Blowing Power to Play MIDI Music

Wind instruments are, like, one of the big categories, right up there with percussion and string instruments. But you don’t often see them in the MIDI music scene, do you? That’s all about pressing buttons and it is all very digital. So if you want something new, Liz Clark’s Adafruit tutorial will show you how to use your blowing power to play MIDI music.

MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is just a technical standard for storing, transferring, and generating sounds in real-time. You can play MIDI music by pressing electronic or virtual buttons, or by reading files that are akin to digital sheet music.

But while it is ultimately a digital medium, MIDI does have provisions for analog input. You most often see that with velocity or pressure sensing on MIDI controllers, which are important for decent music. A MIDI piano melody, for instance, would feel very flat if you couldn’t record how hard you strike the keys.

In this case, Clark’s MIDI controller uses the pressure of the player’s breath to influence the music. An Adafruit QT Py RP2040 board measures the pressure using an Adafruit BMP585 temperature and pressure sensor breakout board. The QT Py takes the pressure reading, on a scale of 0 to 127, and uses that as a MIDI CC (Continuous Controller) message. The user can select between modulation, breath controller, volume, sustain, and channel pressure for the CC message.

Just open up whatever MIDI or DAW software you like, connect the QT Py to your computer via USB, and blow into the tube to use the pressure to influence those parameters in your music. You can combine that with a few conventional MIDI buttons (or your computer keyboard) to play a digital flute, or you can get creative and invent an entirely new type of virtual instrument.