MIT student, Amit Zoran, has been collaborating with violin maker Marco Coppiardi on a new guitar concept. The idea is a kind of synthesis between the natural acoustic properties of wood and digital modeling.
From MIT News…
Its creator, Media Lab master’s student Amit Zoran, explains that each piece of wood is unique and will behave in a different way when it is part of an instrument and begins to vibrate in response to the strings attached to it. Computers can’t model all the details of that unique responsiveness, he says. So, as he began experimenting with the design of this new instrument, he wondered “what would happen if you could plug in acoustic information, like we do with digital information on a memory stick?”…
…The five electronic pickups on the soundboard provide detailed information about the wood’s acoustic response to the vibration of the strings. This information is then processed by the computer to simulate different shapes and sizes of the resonating chamber. “The original signal is not synthetic, it’s acoustic,” Zoran says. “Then we can simulate different shapes, or a bigger instrument.” The guitar can even be made to simulate shapes that would be impossible to build physically. “We can make a guitar the size of a mountain,” he says. Or the size of a mouse.
So, it’s an acoustic version of a modeling guitar. The “soundboard’ has five piezos on it. Then, the signal from the soundboard goes through the digital gazoohie. The kicker is that the soundboard is interchangeable with other soundboards. Different wood, different sound, kind of thing.
Check out the clip here.
As always, it takes a clear mind to make it man! then, click pause on the music player located in the side bar before playing the YouTube.
What do you think? Something to it or just more re-inventing the guitar jive?
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