Blogging Guitar - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

What we've done is we've made a a musical instrument, an acoustic guitar that kind of tries to tell you its own life story. It kind of captures its history and then it'll sort of play it back to you. The guitar is called the Carolyn guitar and it's actually named after an Irish composer and a harpist who was kicking around at the turn of the 18th century called Turlo O' Carolyn and he was a sort of itinerant musician. So he traveled from house to house and rich patrons put him up and he would collect and compose tunes on his way and that's why the guitar has got this kind of Celtic look and theme as well in honor of him. In computing at the moment there's this kind of growing interest in what's called the internet of things and this is at least to my mind it's about taking everyday possibly non-digital objects and actually digitally connecting them to the internet. So putting sensors in them or possibly actuators or displays or other technologies so that everyday stuff becomes digitally connected. And now there's lots of reasons you might want to do that. It might be about kind of sustainable use. It might be about logistics, knowing where things are or security, but I think one thing that it could be about is actually getting things to capture memories and stories. Um because this might potentially make them more valuable. The inspiration a couple of years back actually came from an existing instrument I had which is a banjo which I've kind of got here actually which I'll kind of show you. I hope people like banos. It's a it's a Marmite kind of thing. Oh, it's a bit out of tune and the strings need changing. They probably not been changed since when it was made which was a 1927. That much I found out about it. So this is a 1927 New Yorkmade banjo actually made in Harlem. And there's a couple of notable things about it. Personally, I think it's beautiful. Look at the kind of marketetry on the back there. This is all kind of inlaid. Uh that's a handcarved neck. It's a handcarved head. So, somebody invested a huge amount of effort into to making this. But I also just wondered what kind of stories it could tell from New York in 1927 if that was where it was played as well as made. I mean, that was prohibition time. Was it in a jazz band? Was it in a jazz club? In a speak easy that was raided by the feds. And it just kind of got my imagination going. And then you know the kind of sense that I only wish I knew about all the people who had played this banjo and where it had been and the things it had seen. It's older than I am. Uh it will probably persist after I've gone and fall into someone else's hands. So that was the inspiration was to make an instrument from scratch that would capture its life story from the very beginning from the initial choice of woods through to its design uh its features, its construction um and then as it's released into the world to the various people that that play it. Then of course there's the fascination of a handmade guitar about knowing how it was was made as well. So all of that is provenence. It adds value to the object. And then finally of course the stories of who actually plays it. You know if a guitar is owned or played by someone famous then that makes it incredibly valuable. So you know some guitars have sold for a million dollars in the past just because of who had played them. So once we decided to do it I guess then we kind of get a bit more into the digital technology and the question was how to go about doing it. Um and there are a number of routes open at that point. um we might have chosen to put uh electronics of different kinds into the instrument. So we might have opened it up and put a wireless GPS transmitter or microphones um or made it a its own kind of access point for Wi-Fi networks or whatever. Uh which I think could be a really interesting thing to do. Um but we opted for a different approach and we decided to work with a technology that I've spoken to you about before which was aesthetic codes and that allows you to create interactive surface decoration. So if we look at the instrument here the patterns that you can see these are all these interactive decorations and I can point a device like a phone or a tablet at those and I can trigger information or upload information to the guitar's sort of what you would call digital footprint. So I kind of open up my aesthetic codes uh app on the phone. You can download the app yourself. It's on iTunes and Google Play as well. So, you can scan things and do your own patterns. Anyway, I've opened it up and I've got my kind of Carolyn experience running. Let's start on the back bizarrely. And there's a nice kind of big code on there. And uh once it comes into focus, you can see it scans it and then it takes me to some information about the guitar. Now, uh I've chosen to map for the back of the guitar onto its story. So, it says, "Let me tell you my story, how I came to be, where I've been, who I've met." And then if I choose to open that, it's going to take me to the guitars blog. And now this is the guitar's live blog, carolon guitar.com. And this is where we're telling the story of the guitar from how it was built, all the woods that were chosen, uh, right the way through to eventually all the people that are going to play it. One of the ideas we wanted to play with was being able to scan the codes at different distances. So for some people, it would be about if you were holding the guitar really close to it, like a player, but we also wanted to involve audiences or possibly people through our shop window. So, we thought, let's have a really big code on the guitar. And where's the the biggest real estate you've got? Well, it's the back. So, we sort of put one on the back with a view that you might display it with its back to the audience. What a strange idea. Or maybe through a shop window you could scan it, which I kind of still think is a good idea. You can actually see the initial design. This is when we were designing the guitar. This was us having the idea, but it still feels slightly weird to me to display a guitar with its back to the audience. I don't know. It's almost kind of rude or something. I can't quite figure it out. But maybe I'll get used to it, you know? Maybe it won't feel like it's ignoring everyone in the future. On the top of the guitar here, we've got a kind of an unusual bit of code that I'm going to scan. There we go. And this is the guitar's user guide. It's its user manual. So, you may wonder why a guitar needs a user guide. One of the things you need to know is about adjusting the pickup volume and changing the battery. It's not so obvious on this guitar cuz you have to remove the top sound hole. You can see there's some little magnets on the bottom that hold it in place. And then it tells you you can find the battery inside and so on. Um, so the guitar does come with a sort of user guide and you can scan the guitar to get that and that tells you how to do routine maintenance jobs. It actually tells you how to play the Carolyn guitar as well. It says, uh, press down the strings with one hand and pick them with the other and move both hands around until it sounds good. So, I'm now going to scan this Celtic pattern on the front of the guitar. And this has taken me to a page called performances. So here we've um documented or we will be documenting a series of performances like on video or audio. So if I open this page, we've only got one performance so far and this is from Nick Perez is the luier who made the guitar. So this is Nick playing his baby for the first time. Here he is. Basically, you can tap on the guitar and see where it's been, what it's played, how it's Yeah. And we'll invite musicians to send us tracks or invite audiences to upload bits of video. So the guitar eventually will become its its own channel for the performances that people choose to to leave on it. I know when we did the aesthetic codes film, there were some comments mentioning the finite amount of codes available. What sort of thinking on that from your point of view? It's still a live question. It's a complicated question and I thought the the comments were absolutely spot on in that regard compared to QR codes uh where you've got, you know, millions of unique codes. Here you've got a limited set. It's probably currently a few tens, maybe hundred. Yes, eventually we'll be able to push that further, but it's much smaller. It just plays out in a very different way. So, we actually only need a few codes to decorate the guitar. The question is, of course, those codes aren't unique to us and that other people might be using their codes. They might be putting them on branding or bowls or logos. The way that works though is that in the app, what you can do essentially is say in this app, look, I'm going to view the world through the lens of the Carolyn guitar. So the kind of mapping between what you're looking at in the real world and what you're looking at on the phone is something you can play with. You can also make and publish your own mapping. So in the app, if you want to map the guitar to something else, uh you could actually can make the codes point at your own musician's website for example. So you could kind of each owner of the guitar could reconfigure the app for them or their friends or whatever and you can start to kind of mess around with it a bit. So we heard a little bit with Luia playing it. Are you technically its first owner or um Well, that's a good question really. I think I should probably say this point. I think the university is probably technically its owner. Just to to make that kind of clear [Music] If we're starting to embed digital materials, then that's another kind of layer. So, that looks suspiciously like it's the same code. Oh, there we go. We've got it again. Arduino is it's almost like a small computer on a board. It's not quite that, but it's a small programmable