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  #1  
Old 08-14-2014, 01:43 PM
Carolan Carolan is offline
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Default A guitar that tells its life story through interactive patterns

I'd love to get your views on our acoustic guitar research project …

Every guitar tells a story, from the tonewoods that form it, to the craft of its making, to the players that own it, to the places it visits, and to the many songs that it sings.

Our project aims to create a unique acoustic guitar; one that has been created with the express purpose of capturing and telling its own life history.

Our guitar is called Carolan in honour of the legendary composer Turlough O’Carolan, the last of the great blind Irish harpers, and an itinerant musician who roamed Ireland at the turn of the 18th century, composing and playing beautiful celtic tunes. Like it’s namesake, Carolan is a roving bard; a performer that passes from place to place, learning tunes, songs and stories as it goes and sharing them with the people it encounters along the way.

This is possible because of an unusual technology that hides digital codes within the decorative patterns adorning the instrument. These act somewhat like QR codes in the sense that you can point a phone or tablet at them to access or upload information via the Internet. Unlike QR codes, however, they are aesthetically beautiful and form a natural part of instrument’s decoration. This unusual and new technology enables our guitar to build and share a ‘digital footprint’ throughout its lifetime, but in a way that resonates with both the aesthetic of an acoustic guitar and the craft of traditional luthiery.

https://carolanguitar.files.wordpres...7zxz6zs9l8.jpg

To make such a guitar is a challenging project, one that must necessarily draw together a uniquely skilled team including a luthier, graphic designer, but also computer scientists.

Please follow our project blog at carolanguitar.com over the coming months to see how we set about assembling our team, design and build the Carolan guitar, and then follow its continuing story as it makes it way into the world. We'll keep you updated and would welcome your views and comments as well as discussions about possible collaborations.
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Old 08-15-2014, 09:18 PM
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Very interesting; thanks for sharing and I'll be sure to follow along.
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Old 08-15-2014, 10:02 PM
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As will I. Looking forward to more info!
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Old 08-20-2014, 11:04 AM
Carolan Carolan is offline
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Default Working on a mahogany neck

After a long period of design we've finally begun applying tools to wood. The neck is being made from a piece of reclaimed mahogany while the back and sides are from flamed maple.



Mind you, there is plenty more digital design still to do. Next up, we're going to be building a cardboard prototype so we can test how far away someone can be and still scan the patterns using a smart phone.

Follow our blog for more details:
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Old 08-21-2014, 10:39 AM
Redpick Redpick is offline
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The future is here....
BTW, what's a QR code?
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Old 08-21-2014, 09:45 PM
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That sounds like a fun project, but I wonder why one would build something dependent on technology that will be obsolete inside of 5 years.
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Old 08-22-2014, 11:01 AM
Carolan Carolan is offline
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A great question - thanks for asking it - and one that gets right to the heart of our research project. Sorry if my attempt to answer it is a bit long winded …

There is a real mix of technologies in the project and so it is useful to think about exactly what ones might be obsolete in five years?

The most general ‘technology’ here is that a guitar might have a valuable ‘data history or even it’s own social media identity. I’ll admit that this is a bit of an unusual idea when you first encounter it, but it mirrors current thinking in the IT industry that all sorts of things may have digital footprints, especially valuable things such as cars, buildings and of course guitars. I reckon there is a good argument that capturing the history of guitars adds value to them, from the high value of famous and long-lived instruments with stories to tell to the idea of there being guitar passports to stop our instruments being confiscated and destroyed under CITES and Lacey legislation. The IT industry is currently talking up this whole digital history thing as being part of the ‘Internet of Things’. Of course it could just be a five year fad though.

The next technology idea is that of using mobile phones to access this information. It does seems possible that mobile phones will change plenty over the coming decades and our current smartphones could easily be obsolete in 5 years. But would their future equivalents – even smarter phones or even Google Glass perhaps? – still support similar kinds of access to data about things such as guitars? I think they might.

The next more specific technology is that of scanning visual patterns on things. It’s true that QR codes feel a bit faddy right now, with all sorts of things being plastered with them and scant evidence of people using them. However, their predecessor, the common barcode has been around since the 50s and is still with us and is still widely used. Then there is the increasing range of very small and cheap cameras that are available to scan things and new even more powerful ones becoming widespread (Kinects for example). Personally, I suspect that the idea of scanning visual codes is here to stay.

Finally we narrow down to the specific technology here – aestheticodes. This is definitely a research technology and so there is a very good chance that it will be obsolete in five years (that’s the nature of research for you). However, I think that there is a good chance that there will be some kind of equivalent – and hopefully better – technology that will allow us to scan aesthetically beautiful patterns rather than clunky barcodes and QR codes.

So it’s probably best to think of this particular guitar as a research probe. A one-off prototype that raises questions like yours. The plan is to learn some answers so we can develop some better technologies and also figure out how best to use them.

What a ramble. Hope I made some kind of sense?
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Old 08-22-2014, 09:39 PM
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Thanks for the reply.

Being in tech, I am wary of trends and their fleetingness, especially when they get applied to forever objects with an infinite shelf life like a guitar. Twenty years ago, bar codes were suddenly the hot new revolutionary thing. They were going to be everywhere. Remember the Cue Cat? It went nowhere. Ten years ago RFID chips were going to be embedded in everything, leading to zero theft, automated inventory and instant, human-free, error-free checkouts at the grocery store. These days it's QR codes and they've even become a joke:

from http://shouldiuseaqrcode.com.

Of course all these technologies are very useful and still with us today, but none of them has achieved the penetration they were supposed to, mostly because either they solved a problem that wasn't worth solving or because their implementation was more burdensome than the problem they were addressing.

Whatever happens, it's a guitar project and an opportunity to learn things, so good for you guys.

Apologies for the thread derail. I look forward to more pictures.
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Old 08-24-2014, 08:51 AM
Carolan Carolan is offline
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Hi – thanks - all good points and I agree with your comments on the fleetingness of technologies in relation to the relative permanence of traditionally built artefacts such as acoustic guitars.

Of course guitars themselves are technologies and are also subject to trends and evolution over time. Even the most traditional of the technologies – those concerned with the wood itself – do evolve, and could change quite rapidly soon if tonewood supplies become scarce and guitar builders are forced to seek alternatives. Then there are various other technologies that get embedded into guitars such as onboard electronics. I guess that we’ve seen quite rapid evolution in these over the past couple of decades. Seems to me there is also a clear tension around how deeply embedded into the instrument these should be. Is it better to have minimal mics and pickups hidden inside the instrument and then plenty of external electronics (seems to be the current fashion, certainly at the high end of the market) or is it sometimes good to have built in controls for volume, EQ, tuning and possibly other functions?

I guess our approach in the project is a bit weird. In some ways we’re making quite big changes to the instrument by actually covering it with patterns. Another way of seeing it is that we’re not really changing the traditional instrument at all, as there are no additional electronics or digital stuff in the guitar itself and so it should be able to stand alone as an instrument no matter what happens to the digital technologies in the future.

Finally, this discussion reminds me of the book 'How Buildings Learn' by the architect Stewart Brand who described the evolution of buildings in terms of different ‘shearing layers – site, structure, skin, services, space plan, and stuff - that kind of rub-up against one another as they evolve at different rates.


Anyway, another long posting that probably is at risk of derailing the thread. To try to make up for it, here's a photo from our latest build update in which we’ve been testing out our patterns on a low-tech cardboard mockup. More details on the blog for those interested.

https://carolanguitar.files.wordpres...ly-21st-14.jpg

Back to building the real guitar soon …
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Old 08-24-2014, 08:59 AM
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I assume the guitar itself will not independently upload information to be retrieved via the QR code. So, the history is what whoever enters the information says it is.
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  #11  
Old 08-24-2014, 10:15 AM
Carolan Carolan is offline
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We're still currently working through this. Current thinking is that some of the patterns on the guitar will connect to social media (e.g., Soundcloud, its blog and even Twitter) so that players and even the public can upload whatever thoughts, memories and even tunes they like. Other codes will connect to a more 'official' history such as a maker's label, technical documentation from the build, and perhaps a curated set of blogposts.

I can imagine how some aspects of this could be automated in the longer term - cameras in a venue might spot the guitar and automatically link information from a gig to its history, but we're not going there in the near term and personally I like the idea that the guitar acts more like its own identity with a social media presence and a network of friends who contribute to its history.
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  #12  
Old 08-29-2014, 09:43 AM
Carolan Carolan is offline
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Default Neck and etched headstock

Completed our first proper etching of an interactive code on the flamed maple. This is quite a simple one compared to the designs to come later on.



Nick has been working on the neck, heel, truss rod and headstock too.



Today's blogpost also provides a few tips on judging the severity of earthquakes in the UK for any of you who might fancy visiting us anytime soon.
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  #13  
Old 09-03-2014, 11:01 AM
Carolan Carolan is offline
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Default Guitar aesthetics and fashions

Went to berlin and saw some ancient and ornately decorated guitars which got me thinking about fashions and aesthetics in the acoustic guitar industry and whether our project is going 'against the grain' so to speak. More in our latest Carolan guitar blogpost.

https://carolanguitar.files.wordpres...09/gitarre.jpg
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  #14  
Old 09-03-2014, 02:05 PM
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That's a very pretty headstock and inlay.
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  #15  
Old 09-06-2014, 11:59 AM
Carolan Carolan is offline
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Default Etching and inlaying the back

The back of our guitar is pretty much done. Please take a look at our latest blog post to see how we first etched our interactive pattern into the flamed maple and then inlaid it with Indian Rosewood.

You can see the etching on this youtube video.

The following is the final result.

https://carolanguitar.files.wordpres...-inlayed-2.jpg

It's a great relief that it works - we can successfully scan the pattern with our phones.
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