Talk by Juan Pablo Martínez Ávila

Juan Pablo will give a talk about his PhD on this week.

Augmenting Guitars for Performance Preparation

In this talk I will give an overview of my PhD research project on designing augmented guitars for performance preparation. During my first year I conducted an ethnographic study of the preparation activities of guitarists and bassists in music groups. Such activities encompassed individual practice at home and collaborative practice in rehearsal spaces. In this study we observed that such practices are generally supported by diverse digital and physical resources, such as videos and chord charts. Interaction with this complex ecology of digital and physical resources is finely interwoven into their embodied musical practices, but reflects encumbered interactions when additionally performing with the instrument, which some participants explicitly reported. Naturally, guitars are physical instruments that require skillful two handed use, hence the simultaneous use of additional resources that also require manual operation introduces physical challenges to performance. With this challenge in mind I explored a series of designs which were then deployed over four workshops with guitarists and bassists. Preliminary results reveal a series of tensions between the adoption (or resistance) of such artefacts within the existing practices and the associated ecosystem of resources of this community of practicing guitarists. Lastly I will discuss future work involving design probes to be deployed with selected participants of said community.