Exploring the (un) ambiguous guitar: A qualitative study on the use of gesture disambiguation in augmented instrument design

Some of the performer’s gestures, despite corresponding to different physical interactions, might produce a similar sonic output. This is the case of upward and downward string bends on the guitar where stretching the string shifts the pitch upwards. Bending represents an expressive resource that extends across many different styles of guitar playing. In this study, we presented performers with an augmented electric guitar on which the gesture-to-sound relationship of downward bending gestures is changed depending on how the instrument is configured. Participants were asked to explore and perform a short improvisation under three different conditions, two augmentations that correspond to different auditory imagery and a constrained scenario. The different sessions of the experiment were recorded to conduct thematic analysis as an examination of how gestural disambiguation can be exploited in the design of augmentations that focus on reusing performer's expertise and how the gesture-to-sound entanglement of the different modalities supports or encumbers the performer's embodied relationship with the instrument.