Orbiton vibrating lamella: from working prototype to a manufacturable, performance-led design

Orbiton Sound Limited is developing an acoustic musical interface in which physical lamellas are set into vibration when a key is pressed. Their motion allows the onboard synthesiser to respond continuously to the player’s gestures, creating a more tactile and organic connection than a conventional velocity-sensitive keyboard.

Orbiton had already developed a working prototype using plain rectangular lamellas with its industrial-design team. The prototype successfully demonstrated the wider product principle. The next step was to establish a more predictable, repeatable and manufacturable mechanical basis for a planned pilot production run.

Frugal supported Orbiton through a series of focused Phase 0 commissions and ongoing technical input. The early work addressed an immediate problem with attaching and controlling small tuning masses carried at each lamella tip. Subsequent work established the wider lamella design basis, investigated its dynamic behaviour and developed candidates for the next round of physical prototype testing.

The initial challenge was to attach the tip masses reliably while controlling their assembled mass accurately and repeatably. Variations in the lamella, attached components and assembly process affected the final dynamic behaviour, making consistent manufacture and tuning a real challenge.

Once that problem had been addressed, a wider challenge was to improve the lamella itself. Each lamella needed to operate within narrowly predefined frequency constraints and sustain that motion for as long and as cleanly as practicable, because the quality and consistency of its decay directly shaped the instrument’s feel and expressive response.

Orbiton had already developed the plain rectangular lamellas using its own Python calculation model alongside extensive empirical prototyping. This had taken the uniform-section concept a considerable way, but further gains in decay performance required a different geometric approach.

Each lamella also operated in two distinct playing modes, creating materially different boundary conditions that needed careful consideration. Exploring the resulting design space through one-at-a-time physical prototyping, sequential hand calculations or individual FEA models would have been slow, expensive and unlikely to reveal the full interaction between all the variables.

• Frequency requirements: the lamellas needed to meet specific frequency requirements while preserving a fast, responsive and natural playing feel and reducing player fatigue.

• Two playing modes: the same component operated under two distinct restraint conditions, whose different and sometimes competing dynamic effects had to be balanced.

• Decay performance: avoidable vibration-energy losses through geometry and material behaviour, interfaces and local stress effects needed to be understood and minimised through design.

• Controlled variation: material, component and assembly variation had to be quantified and accommodated by design, through appropriate tuning or compensation mechanisms.

• Developing interfaces: the final clamping arrangement did not yet exist, so the analysis needed to define an assumed but workable interface detail without constraining its onward development.

• Prototype economics: hundreds of analytical possibilities had to be reduced to a small set that could be manufactured and tested economically.