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AssigneeNippon Gakki Seizo Kabushiki Kaisha
InventorsAkira Nakada, Eiichiro Aoki, Akiyoshi Oya, Takatoshi Okumura, Yasuji Uchiyama, Eiichi Yamaga
Estimating the term…
An electronic musical instrument is provided with an upper, a lower and a pedal keyboards and musical tone generating circuits dependently corresponding to respective keyboards and, in addition thereto, an auxiliary musical tone generating circuit which is independent of the keyboards and can be selectively coupled with a particular keyboard according to the designation by a keyboard selection switch. This auxiliary musical tone generating circuit produces tone signals having a particular tone color. Key codes for a selected one of the keyboards among key codes supplied by a channel assignment circuit are latched separately in the auxiliary circuit, and musical tones corresponding to the latched key codes are produced in this particular tone color. An envelope control circuit of the electronic musical instrument includes a detection circuit which detects switching of the keyboard selection switch and the amplitude envelope of a musical tone is temporarily cleared upon detection of the switching of the keyboard selection switch.
In an electronic musical instrument having a plurality of keyboards and first musical tone generating means for generating musical tones corresponding to multibit binary coded key operation signals supplied from said keyboards, said signals specifying both the note name and the depressed and released state of the corresponding operated key, the improvement comprising:
In a polyphonic electronic musical instrument having two or more keyboards, notes selected on said keyboards being represented by binary key codes, at least one time division multiplexed main tone generator section for generating musical tones, and a channel assignment circuit for assigning binary key codes representing keys selected on specific keyboards to certain time division multiplex channels dedicated to those keyboards, said main tone generator section receiving said time division multiplexed binary key codes and generating the musical tones corresponding to the assigned key codes, the improvement comprising:
In an electronic musical instrument having plural keyboards, the improvement comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.
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Channel-assigning means for polyphonic instruments: with means to assign more than one channel to any single key
Electrophonic musical instruments
Term ended 2 Jan 1999 (estimated)
USPTO file history isn’t available for this patent, so only indexed dates are shown.
This invention relates to an electronic musical instrument in which a musical tone generating circuit which does not belong to any keyboard is provided so that it may be used commonly for any keyboard as required.
Normally, in a conventional electronic musical instrument, musical tone generating circuits are provides for respective keyboards so as to provide musical tones having tone colors which are different from one another depending upon the kind of keyboard. in other words, different musical tone generating circuits are provided for different keyboards, and, accordingly, when a key in a keyboard is depressed, a musical tone generating circuit provided for the keyboard produces a musical tone having a tone color peculiar to that keyboard.
A technique called "inter-keyboard coupler" is known in the art. In this technique, a musical tone generating circuit which belongs to one keyboard only as described above is driven by the key operation of another keyboards, so that the tones of the keyboard operated actually and the tones of the keyboard not actually operated are produced together. However, this "inter-keyboard coupler" has the difficulty that musical tones having all tone colors peculiar to the coupled keyboard are produced in response to the key operation on the actually operated keyboard and it is impossible to select a part of the tone colors; that is, by the key operation of keyboard, all the musical tone generating circuits for the coupled keyboard are driven.
In the accompanying drawings:
FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing one example of a digital processing type electronic musical instrument to which the technical concept of this invention is applied;
FIG. 2 is a timing chart indicating relations of tone production channels and respective keyboards;
FIG. 1 shows a preferred example of an electronic musical instrument according to this invention, which comprises: a keyboard section 10; a key depression detection circuit 11; a channel assignment circuit 12; a main tone generator section 13; an auxiliary tone generator section 14; an acoustic system 16; and a data multiplexing circuit 17.
The keyboard section 10 includes an upper keyboard, a lower keyboard, and a pedal keyboard. The key depression detection circuit 11 operates to detect a key depressed in the keyboard section 10 and to assign data representative of the key thus depressed to the channel assignment circuit 12. The channel assignment circuit 12 is to assign tone production of a depressed key to one of a predetermined number of tone production channels.
The main tone generator section 13 operates to generate in a known manner the tones of keys depressed in the keyboard section 10. More specifically, in the main tone generator section 13, musical tones (i.e. tone colors) are formed for keys depressed in the upper keyboard, the lower keyboard and the pedal keyboard in manners which are different depending upon the kind of keyboard. The auxiliary tone generator section 14 provided in parallel with the main tone generator section 13 is an additional musical tone generating circuit which constitutes an essential part of this invention.