{"id":898,"date":"2007-10-02T09:48:02","date_gmt":"2007-10-02T15:48:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=898"},"modified":"2007-10-02T09:48:02","modified_gmt":"2007-10-02T15:48:02","slug":"the_automated_g","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=898","title":{"rendered":"The automated guitar"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back when I was seventeen, I was a wretched guitar player in a band with some high school buddies. I could not tune my guitar to save my life, so when it went out of tune my friend Steve, the other guitar player, would have to come over and tune it. I remain scarred by the memory.<\/p>\n

Today’s kids need not suffer such humiliation, however, because Gibson is now manufacturing a line of self-tuning guitars. In a new twist on the manipulation of feedback (something tells me Hendrix would not be amused), the Powertune system uses special piezoelectric pickups to monitor the frequency of each string’s vibrations. The signals are analyzed by a computer embedded in the guitar’s body, which controls tiny motors on the guitar’s tuning pegs that adjust each string’s tension. (A video demonstration is here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The trickiest challenge in building the system was writing tuning algorithms that could achieve the necessary degree of precision, reports<\/a> Technology Review:<\/p>\n

\n

[Inventor Chris] Adams says that because the system is automatic, his company had to develop a tuning algorithm more sensitive than that of most external digital tuners. All guitar players are familiar with the waver of a tuner’s indicator needle even when a string is in tune: the waver results from the minor fluctuations in a string’s vibrations. A human tuning manually can easily ignore these fluctuations, but an automatic system must be programmed to discount them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Purists find the machine distasteful: “‘I think it’s something that isn’t necessary if you’re a good musician,’ says Rick Kelly, a well-known custom-guitar maker at New York’s Carmine Street Guitars. ‘I think there’s something lost in the live experience when you lose the tuning aspect.'” Then again, I can’t remember the last time I saw a guitar player on stage actually tune by ear. Tuning long ago became mediated by digital machines, with the player taking the role of the unskilled machine operator in the process. Powertune simply takes the next logical step, dispensing with the manual labor altogether.<\/p>\n

It’s a good example of how, as computing power continues its relentless rise, software algorithms are able to automate ever more sophisticated work. Are those algorithms freeing us or replacing us? Both, I guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back when I was seventeen, I was a wretched guitar player in a band with some high school buddies. I could not tune my guitar to save my life, so when it went out of tune my friend Steve, the other guitar player, would have to come over and tune it. I remain scarred by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}