Automatic Guitar Player

Each member of our team has both a passion for music and controls. In an artistic piece to demonstrate both of these passions, our team decided to design and produce an autonomous guitar playing device able to play pieces, synonymous to the idea of a player piano. The specifications of the device were to: achieve the same fretting reach as a human guitar player with a six (6) fret reach, able to play 8th notes on a single string at a rate of 120 bpm (strum rate faster than 2 Hz), and depress each string with a force of 12.5N. To satisfy these requirements, the final design chosen utilizes 4 linkage “fingers”. Through many design iterations, the final design shown below was chosen. On the left is the fretting mechanism with its four fingers, and on the right is the picking mechanism.

Due to COVID-19 and the shift to online classes we were unable to build the full mechanism during the semester. However, we completed a significant amount of prototyping and intend to return to the project and complete it once the pandemic is over. In the meanwhile, we have created an interactive visualization of the fretting mechanism and how it would play which can be seen below. You can use the WASD keys to move the guitar around, Z and X to zoom in and out, and the mouse to rotate the view. The guitar currently moves the fingers randomly, but we hope to eventually use the visualization to test our music planning code.

The visualization loads a full model of the guitar which can take up to 30 seconds. Unfortunately, the key presses are not always reliable, so if it not responding try reloading the website.