The idea behind the YouHero was two-fold: First, to make an expressive instrument out of the computer game toy guitar controller from the famous game GuitarHero. With its limited amount of control parameters, this was a challenge. Second, we wanted to provide an alternative to the view that you become a hero by perfect imitation of your idols. Instead, play yourself. You are the hero. In this p...

(5) It's dangerous to drive in Rome. ==> <=/= It's dangerous to drive fast in Rome. (6) It's safe to drive in Des Moines. =/=> <== It's safe to drive fast in Des Moines. (7) It’s strange to see Frances playing electric guitar. ==> <=/= It’s strange to see Frances playing electric guitar poorly. (8) It’s common to see Frances playing electric guitar. =/=> <== It’s common to see Frances playing e...

Even amidst the hustle and bustle of busy lives, numerous people dream of playing a musical instrument. Unfortunately, many may never get a chance to touch one. But this doesn’t stop them from ‘air drumming’ or playing ‘air guitar’ passionately while listening to their favorite tunes. To encourage this passion for music, especially in the absence of a real instrument, we introduce to you the Vi...

This paper presents the Talking Guitar, an electric guitar augmented with a system which tracks the position of the headstock in real time and uses that data to control the parameters of a formant-filtering effect which impresses upon the guitar sound a sense of speech. A user study is conducted with the device to establish an indication of the practicality of using headstock tracking to contro...

Learning to play the guitar usually involves tedious lessons in fingering positions for the left hand. It is difficult for beginners to recognize by themselves whether they are accurately positioning their fingers on the string to make guitar chords. This paper proposes a novel approach for recognizing chords played on a guitar. In real time, it estimates whether a beginner is holding the guita...

This paper describes Song2Guitar which automatically generates difficulty-aware guitar solo cover of popular music from its acoustic signals. Previous research has utilized hidden Markov models (HMMs) to generate playable guitar piece from music scores. Our Song2Guitar extends the framework by leveraging MIR technologies so that it can handle beats, chords and melodies extracted from polyphonic...

In this paper we describe a new guitar-like musical controller. The 'GXtar' is an instrument which takes as a starting point a guitar but his role is to bring different and new musical possibilities while preserving the spirit and techniques of guitar. Therefore, it was conceived and carried out starting from the body of an electric guitar. The fingerboard of this guitar was equipped with two l...

The goal of the project described in this thesis is to gain a deeper understanding of the detailed physics operative in electric guitar pickups in order to be able to build pickups with a more versatile set of tonal qualities. Using phase sensitive lock-in amplifier techniques, the complex impedance of several different guitar pickups was measured over the frequency range of human hearing. The ...

(Near-field Acoustic Holography, Audio Production, Guitar) In recording studios, the placement of microphones to record an acoustic guitar is very much subjected to trial and error and audio engineer preference. In order to make more informed microphone placement decisions, Near-field Acoustic Holography is used to study the sound pressures of the guitar. This technique involves solving the int...