A Gesture Detection with Guitar Pickup and Earphones

For the electric guitar, which takes a large proportion in modern pop music, effects unit (or effector) is no longer optional. Many guitarists already `play' their effects with their instrument. However, it is not easy to control these effects during the play, so lots of new controllers and interfaces have been devised; one example is a pedal type effects that helps players to control effects with a foot while their hands are busy. Some players put a controller on their guitars. However, our instruments are so precious to drill a hole, and the stage is too big for the player who is just kneeling behind the pedals and turning the knobs. In this paper, we designed a new control system for electric guitar and bass. This paper is about a gesture-based sound control system that controls the electric guitar effects (like delay time, reverberation or pitch) with the player's hand gesture. This system utilizes TAPIR signal to trace player's hand motion. TAPIR signal is an acoustic signal that can rarely be received by most people, because its frequency exists between 18 kHz to 22 kHz [TAPIR article]. This system consists of a signal generator, an electric guitar and a sound processor. From the generator that is attached on the player's hand, the TAPIR signal transfers to the magnetic pickup equipped on the electric guitar. Player's gesture is captured as a Doppler shift and the processor calculates the value as the sound effect parameter. In this paper, we focused on the demonstration of the signal transfer on aforementioned system.