Tian JinQin丨MIDIPLUS

Chief Co-artist

Tian Jin Qin

Known as the "Father of Chinese Electronic Musical Instruments", the eldest pioneer in the field of electronic musical instruments in China.
Invented a ribbon-controlled synthesizer, which was in the documentary "Electronic Keyboard", astonished the world.
Invited by 3 foreign companies in 6 months, but he still stayed in the motherland. Granted by the Council ‘National Invention Reward’ as an outstanding expert with great contribution.

In the documentary ‘Electronic Keyboard’
published in 1980, it showed the invention of
the ribbon-controlled synthesizer by him.
From then on, the world knows that there’s
one called Tian Jin Qin.

The ribbon-controlled electronic instrument is very unique.
Performers use various musical performance techniques such as gliding and wiping, which can
express a lot of musical emotions.

Tian Jinqin is committed to researching how to
make electronic musical instruments sound
more "Chinese", using very delicate techniques,
through the coordination of controllers,
oscillators, filters, and envelopes. The tones are
highly restored, including natural reverberation
and material textures. The emotion of playing
technique restores traditional Chinese musical
instruments such as GuQin, GuZheng, PiPa, DiZi
and ErHu.

Tone & Sound

“Sound” is just a noun that represents sound waves. However, it actually has 2 characters in Chinese, namely "sound声（Sheng）" and "tone音（Yin）". The two concepts are different. "Sound" stands for audio waves, And "tone" has the attribute of musical tone, which is an important factor for people to judge the voice texture and sense of hearing. To highlight the difference, Tian Jinqin swaps this two words in Chinese and names his invention ‘Yin Sheng Synthesizer’. See the XK series of ribbon instruments, sound synthesizers and other electronic musical instruments as follows.

Tian Jin Qin is an artist and inventor with both artistic disciplines. He has the artistic accomplishment of a performer and is proficient in performance techniques and emotional expression of musical instruments. Meanwhile, he’s the expert of physical electricity and engineering technology, the author of "Electronic Musical Instrument" and the columnist of some of the mainstream electronic magazines - Science Experiment, Electronic Tianfu, Radio, Electronic World and Electroacoustic Technology. He’s once been the cover character, putting forward many unique insights. Tian’s paper and products were shown on the 14th ICA. Tian has won the Best Thoughts Award with his design published on EDN.