The Actuated Guitar: A platform enabling alternative interaction methods

Playing a guitar is normally only for people with fully functional hands. In this work we investigate alternative interaction concepts to enable or re-enable people with non-functional right hands or arms to play a guitar via actuated strumming. The functionality and complexity of right hand interaction with the guitar is immense. We therefore divided the right hand techniques into three main areas: Strumming, string picking / skipping, and string muting. This paper explores the first stage, strum- ming. We have developed an exploratory platform called the Actuated Guitar that utilizes a normal electrical gui- tar, sensors to capture the rhythmic motion of alternative fully functioning limbs, such as a foot, knee or the head, and a motorized fader moving a pick back and forth across the strings. A microcontroller is utilized for pro- cessing sensor data, which allows flexible mapping of user input to the actuation of the motorized fader. Our approach employs the flexibility of a programmable digi- tal system, allowing us to scale and map different ranges of data from various sensors to the motion of the actuator – thereby making it easier adapt to individual users.