Case study: The endangered guitar

Abstract

The author describes his 15-year development of the hybrid interactive instrument '‘Endangered Guitar’', and how it grew out of an already decade long practice of sonic performances on guitar, followed his aesthetic interests through hundreds of concerts, and influenced these interests in turn. The Endangered Guitar is an instrument is made to facilitate live sound processing. The software '‘listens’' to the guitar input, to then determine the parameters of the electronic processing of the same sounds, responding in a flexible way. The instrument is interactive, in that it does not react in a fully predictable way to the input of the performer. The author makes a case that in order to truly improvise with electronics one has to program '‘uncertainties’’ into the machine. He uses weighted random functions, feedback strategies, and the fuzzy behavior of pitch tracking devices when presented with overtone-rich sounds, which the performer draws from the guitar with a variety of tools.