As a classical guitar fan (my boyfriend won my heart playing Asturias), I am keen on the pure sound of an acoustic guitar. But as the spouse of a guitar hero, I will feel indebted to the inventor of an instrument that will allow my personnal Django Reinhardt to work on his next masterpiece without ruinning my favorite TV show.
This could be possible using Professor Kashyap’s photonic guitar:
The process is really simple. On the frame of an acoustic guitar, Prof. Kashyap has replaced the usual nylon strings with a
multimode optical fiber in which a laser light circulates. From this simple substitution emerges a new sound alchemy.
Hitting of one string generates a wave, which is transformed into an electrical signal using a photosensor. This signal is finally sent to a classic audio system with amplifiers and speakers (or headphones depending on your neighbours’ musical sense).
To finally convince any guitar hero, I could add that stopping the strings along the instrument’s fretboard produces the usual musical scale progressions, as on any guitar and that the full harmonic richness of a note is preserved.
If your music lover looks more like Syd Barrett than Joaquín Rodrigo, tell him/her that as any tone of the harmonic series can be isolated, it can be amplified at will. That can lead to a much more sophisticated richness of timbre than what we find on an electrical instrument.
Want to hear Jeux Interdits played on the prototype?
Click hear for a sample !
