The Talking Guitar: Headstock Tracking and Mapping Strategies

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 control effect parameters and to suggest natural and useful mapping strategies. Individual movements and gestures are evaluated in order to guide further development of the system.