Zen Flute Mouth Theremin

When you think about MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), you likely envision someone playing a keyboard. The musical input for this format, however, doesn’t have to be a keyboard. It can actually be just about anything. MilwaukeeGuitar developed a unique MIDI instrument called the Zen Flute Mouth Theremin, which lets you play electronic music like a flute.

Or Theremin. Or really something entirely new when you look at it closely. This instrument was so unique/impressive that it won the 2023 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech. Lots more info on the device can be found here, and it's available for sale if you want to get your hands on one.

The Zen Flute runs on a Teensy 4.0 development board, which takes input from a button, analog joystick, and mouth sensor setup, passing signals to your DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) over MIDI. Or, more specifically, via MPE (combo-acronym MIDI Polyphonic Expression). Long story short (see ~5:45 in the video), the way the firmware is set up now allows you to start on a certain pitch and “pull in” to the correct note.

What’s really interesting about the Zen Flute is its mouth sensor. A small speaker in the mouthpiece transmits sound into your oral cavity, which acts as a Helmholtz resonator that you can change in real time. This modified sound is then received by a microphone in of the mouthpiece for MIDI control.

While it seems you would have to play it to really understand how the instrument works, the concept is explained in the instruction manual and in the video below.