2: The Carolan Guitar

Steve Benford, Adrian Hazzard, Alan Chamberlain, Liming Xu, Juan Martinez-Avila – University of Nottingham

Summary:
The Carolan Guitar explores how and why musical instruments might become connected to digital records of their province and history (Carolan Guitar).

Description:
To date this demonstrator has explored how and why musical instruments might become connected to digital records of their making, history and use over their lifetimes and how this may ultimately enhance their utility, meaning and value. There are three interleaved aspects to this demonstrator.

  • How to integrate a unique visual recognition technology into the traditional craft of instrument making that does not disrupt its function or form.
  • Deploying an augmented acoustic guitar (the Carolan Guitar) as a technology probe to explore the broad nature of and potential uses for the digital record of a music instrument. The guitar has been loaned to many musicians and performers to use in their everyday performance practice, so as to enable an accelerated capture of its use. Data generated from these engagements (e.g. media such as recordings or videos, writings, reflections) are captured and added to its online digital record.
  • Using the Annalist tool being developed at Oxford to create a linked-data information model to support Carolan’s digital record (see demonstrator 19: Digital Music Object Prototyping with Annalist: The Carolan Guitar).

Carolan Website / Digital record:
https://carolanguitar.com/

Publications:
Benford, Steve and Koleva, Boriana and Quinn, Anthony and Thorn, Emily-Clare and Glover, Kevin and Preston, William and Hazzard, Adrian and Rennick-Egglestone, Stefan and Greenhalgh, Chris and Mortier, Richard (2017) Crafting interactive decoration. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction . ISSN 1557-7325

Darzentas, Dimitrios and Hazzard, Adrian and Brown, Michael and Flintham, Martin and Benford, Steve (2016) Harnessing the digital records of everyday things. In: Design Research Society 2016, 27-30 June 2016, Brighton, UK.

Benford, Steve and Hazzard, Adrian and Chamberlain, Alan and Glover, Kevin and Greenhalgh, Chris and Xu, Liming and Hoare, Michaela and Darzentas, Dimitrios (2016) Accountable artefacts: the case of the Carolan guitar. In: Computer-Human Interaction (CHI 2016), 7-12 May 2016, San Jose, USA. doi>10.1145/2858036.2858306

Steve Benford, Adrian Hazzard, Alan Chamberlain, Kevin Glover, Chris Greenhalgh, Liming Xu, Michaela Hoare, and Dimitrios Darzentas. 2016. Experiencing the Carolan Guitar. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3651-3654. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2851581.2890264

Benford, Steve and Hazzard, Adrian and Chamberlain, Alan and Xu, Liming(2015) Augmenting a guitar with its digital footprint. In: 15th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, May 31 – June 3 2015, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA.

Steve Benford, Adrian Hazzard, and Liming Xu. 2015. The Carolan guitar: a thing that tells its own life story. interactions 22, 3 (April 2015), 64-66. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2745960