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Sound Processing Guitar

As my senior design project at NYU, I chose to iterate the guitar I had been designing for the previous year into an instrument with on-board sound processing.

I redesigned the sides of the initial prototype to be ABS printed components that swung open to allow the addition of a Raspberry Pi with a Pisound HAT. This enabled the player to program the Pi with whatever effects they wanted and control them live via capacitive touch sensors mounted on the body.


The various prototypes were laser cut, waterjet cut, and CNC milled to test the design, electronics, and physical playability respectively, as well as provide example projects on the use of the machines in the MakerSpace where I worked.


For a project in another class, I programmed the Pi to transpose each note played on the guitar to be reflected around middle C, effectively reversing the natural acoustics. As the acoustic note gets lower, the output electronic note gets higher, and vice versa. This was partially done as an experiment in spectral analysis, and partially to see if players could flip the way they usually played and re-accustom themselves to the exact opposite.

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