A TMR Angle Sensor for Gesture Acquisition and Disambiguation on the Electric Guitar

This paper presents a novel approach to the acquisition of musical gestures on guitar based on Tunneling Magnetoresistance (TMR) sensing. With this minimally invasive setup, tracking of the horizontal displacement of the strings is used to capture gestures related to left and right-hand techniques. A pitch-based calibration is suggested to map the sensed displacement to pitch shifts so that the acquired signals can be directly used to estimate pitch produced by string bending in real-time. Some of the performer’s gestures, despite corresponding to different physical interactions, might produce a similar sonic output, as is the case of upward and downward string bends on the guitar. The proposed technology can be used to disambiguate between these gestures whether that is for automatic transcription purposes or for crafting instrument augmentations that build upon the performer’s existing expertise