A case for electronic ocarinas

Ocarinas are often marketed as 'easy to play', and in some respects, they are. They have an approachable fingering system, and it is easy to get a sound out of an ocarina. But in other regards, playing this instrument is technically challenging. There are many hidden details, and intuition often leads to poor solutions.

However, this marketing approach works because it has an element of truth. Ocarinas look simple, and there are teaching approaches which enable a beginner to quickly play something that they recognise. But such approaches typically do not focus on the quality of the performance, they may ignore intonation accuracy for instance.

An electronic ocarina could keep the intuitive elements, for example, the fingering system, and automate the ones that tend to cause problems, reducing the traps for a learner.

For example, an electronic ocarina could:

• Use the four-hole English pendant system as a basis, which is often intuitive for young children due to its fingering simplicity.
• Eliminate the tuning errors which are inherent in this design.
• Map blowing pressure to volume instead of pitch.

Doing that, you'd have an instrument that's much easier to play in a group with little experience, while still achieving a good sound. Such an instrument can also be played with headphones, and thus a learner never has to worry about bothering others. By comparison, acoustic ocarinas are loud, and attempting to mute one mostly makes it sound bad.

It is also worth considering the flexibility allowed by electronic instruments. How they respond is not fixed, and pressure sensitivity could be raised or lowered to accommodate preference or new players. The design flexibility could also significantly improve the ergonomics for children or people with small hands, as the physical design of an electronic instrument is not constrained by physics.

I don't think the idea of an electronic ocarina has to be limited to being a teaching tool, though. From the point of view of a serious instrument, many aspects of the ocarina are challenging to deal with. For example:

• Ocarinas have a very limited sounding range.
• How an ocarina responds to changes in blowing pressure varies a lot over its range. Creating a consistent vibrato requires a much larger pressure change on the high notes than the low notes.
• Having two thumb holes is also an ergonomic challenge.

If the pressure non-linearity were reduced or eliminated, the range extended (perhaps by emulating overblowing found on other instruments), and the right thumb used only for support, the task of playing would be much easier. While you may think this 'dumbs down' the instrument, it does not. People only have a limited number of 'cleverness beans', so if the fundamental task of playing is more straightforward, the skill ceiling is raised.

The electronic ocarina is not a new idea, and there are multiple examples of such instruments made as hobby projects. They utilise capacitive touchpads and allow pitch slides to be performed, by detecting how much of the pad is covered. I do think this can be developed much further than it has been. If enough effort were put into this, I can see it becoming a very able instrument.

Implementation ideas

The ocarina's tone is close to a pure sine wave with few overtones and a bit of wind noise. I don't think it would be that difficult to synthesise realistically. The challenge would probably be modelling of details, like the slight changes in sound caused by how a note is tongued and the pressure at the instant the note starts.

Another factor is that less information is available. Acoustic wind instruments are sensitive to hole shading, for example, whereas capacitive touch only detects contact as far as I'm aware.

Electronic instruments in general tend to handle such details poorly, although that is primarily a lack of research effort and is not unsolvable. For instance, proximity sensors exist, and there are very realistic-sounding VST synthesisers for many other instruments.

As I have already invested a lot of time in developing acoustic ocarinas, I have no intention of further developing this idea; thus, it is left as an opportunity for the reader. I suspect that even a basic electronic ocarina would be easier to market along the 'easy to play' idea, as it would be closer to the truth. It is already known that this idea works in principle, as the game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time does essentially the same thing with its virtual instrument.