SABRe: The Augmented Bass Clarinet

An augmented bass clarinet is developed in order to extend the performance and composition potential of the instru-ment. Four groups of sensors are added: key positions, inertial movement, mouth pressure and trigger switches. The instrument communicates wirelessly with a receiver setup which produces an OSC data stream, usable by any appli-cation on a host computer. The SABRe projects intention is to be neither tied to its inventors nor to one single player but to offer a reference design for a larger community of bass clarinet players and composers. For this purpose, several instruments are made available and a number of composer residencies, workshops, presentations and concerts are organized. These serve for evaluation and improvement purposes in order to build a robust and user friendly extended musical instrument, that opens new playing modalities.