Vocabulary to speak about touch: analysis of the discourse of electric guitar players

This work presents a multidisciplinary approach to vibrotactile perception, applying linguistic methods to musical acoustics. We are interested more particularly in the sense of touch as a part of the multisensory experience of playing a musical instrument. Six words and their inflections are chosen from the literature in musical acoustics dealing with vibrotactile perception: “comfort”, “dynamics”, “response”, “feeling”, “touch” and “vibration”. Their use by musicians in playing situation is analyzed. The data used in this article comes from transcripts of two previous studies, conducted in French with professional guitarists natively speaking French. The linguistic analysis of the corpus is based on different features which help to categorize the utterances according to each observed parameter, namely the relationship with the sense of touch, the object that is qualified by the words under study and the implication in discourse of the interviewee. The results permit to understand the use of the six categories of words in relationship with the sense of touch, and provide perspectives to use some of these words to focus the discourse on the sense of touch in future studies.

Playing and Fighting as an Electric Violinist

The violin is an instrument used in various musical genres. Besides preserving, elaborating, and valuating, the classical form of the instrument as well as the classical violin repertory, an electronic version of the instrument has entered the music business many decades ago. It allows the musician to produce sounds ranging from classical violin sounds to electric guitar or even electric bass sounds. Nora Kudrjawizki (‘Angelstrings’, “One Violin Orchestra”) is an electric violinist living in Berlin and using the instrument for as many different genres and occasions as possible: playing Nirvana songs or fighting with the violin bow as an improvised sword to “Pirates of the Caribbean” music as part of her performance. Her work will be presented as a case study and will be set into a bigger framework with further electric violinist statements generated from the literature. I focus on the differences in the instrumentalist–instrument relation when playing electric or acoustic. My aim is to prove that the electric violin is mostly used to play public and impress others and that there are also musically interesting aspects and individual experiences that should be valued.

Design and Construction of an Electric Guitar Body Made of Carbon Composite

This paper presents the selection of technology, technological and working procedures to construct the body of an electric guitar (Stratocaster type.). The used material for the electric guitar construction was carbon composite material offset by standardly used components. The carbon composite was chosen because of its excellent properties suitable for guitar construction. Described and used technologies were Manual Wet Lamination Technology and Vacuum Bag Molding (VBM) technology, and both are affordable and uncomplicated methods.

Comparison of the Vibration Damping of the Wood Species Used for the Body of an Electric Guitar on the Vibration Response of Open-Strings

Research show that the vibrations of the strings and the radiated sound of the solid body electric guitar depend on the vibrational behavior of its structure in addition to the extended electronic chain. In this regard, most studies focused on the vibro-mechanical properties of the neck of the electric guitar and neglected the coupling of the vibrating strings with the neck and the solid body of the instrument. Therefore, the aim of the study was to understand how the material properties of the solid body could affect the stiffness and vibration damping of the whole instrument when comparing ash (Fraxinus excelsior L.) and walnut (Juglans regia L.) wood. In the electric guitar with identical components, higher modal frequencies were confirmed in the structure of the instrument when the solid body was made of the stiffer ash wood. The use of ash wood for the solid body of the instrument due to coupling effect resulted in a beneficial reduction in the vibration damping of the neck of the guitar. The positive effect of the low damping of the solid body of the electric guitar made of ash wood was also confirmed in the vibration of the open strings. In the specific case of free-free vibration mode, the decay time was longer for higher harmonics of the E2, A2 and D3 strings.

On the performance sound design of a stringed instrument by the control of the stiffness and mass of the component part

This study investigates the difference of performance sounds of an electric guitar with a metal pickguard. The sounds of the open strings of the guitar are measured, showing that the damping time becomes shorter than that obtained with a commonly used plastic pickguard. Further, it was also found that the sounds of the 1 and 2 strings were distinct and those of the other strings were slightly suppressed when the metal pickguard was used. Therefore, the metal pickguard is effective in making sharp, clear, and distinct sounds. We changed the material of the pickguard from plastic to copper. In the experiments, simultaneous measurements of the vibrational acceleration of the peg, pickguard, and output voltage of the guitar with a constant plucking force of the strings were performed. It was found that the profile of the RMS value of the vibrational acceleration of the pickguard changed when the copper pickguard was used. Moreover, the vibrational modes of copper the pickguard were different than the others. In conclusion, it was determined that the sound quality is affected by the vibrational characteristics; thus, it can be adjusted by varying the means by which the pickguard is attached to the guitar body.