Air instrument
In the context of musical performance, air instruments refers to the miming of sound-producing-gestures used in playing musical instruments. Simply put, air instruments are imaginary. Examples of air instruments include but are not limited to:
- air guitar – for electric guitar or acoustic guitar;
- air bass – for bass guitar;
- air drums – for snare drums, bongos or bass drum, or most commonly air drum set often with double bass pedals;
- air keyboards – such as air piano for piano;
- air violin – for violin or cello;
- air flute – for flute ;
- air xylophone – for the xylophone;
- air trumpet – for trumpet ;
- air trombone – for trombone.
Origins
Air piano
For the air piano, both left and right hands can be used, as well as moving the feet to mimic pressing the piano floor pedals.Besides the imaginary air piano, there is a motion-activated musical instrument interface called an "AirPiano" which is controlled by waving the hands above the top.
The AirPiano is a musical computer interface which allows playing and controlling software instruments simply by moving hands in the air over the device, connected by USB cable. Above the AirPiano is an invisible matrix of virtual keys plus faders, each pre-assigned with MIDI messages and waiting to be triggered, via infrared sensors. The length of each triggered note is determined by the time the hand is placed over the corresponding virtual key. Beyond the feedback of the sounds changing, hand placement is also confirmed by LED feedback. The first version of AirPiano generated polyphonic sound, with 24 keys using 8 faders.
The AirPiano software provides for the loading/saving of presets and transposing notes. The AirPiano technique has been filed as a Provisional U.S. Patent Application.