Hack your Guitar

The hacked guitar is a project aimed at bringing code to musical life. You can do it too.

At the Mind, Matter and Media Lab, we design and invent new technologies, pedagogies, and experiences for engaging everyone (and we mean EVERYONE) in meaningful, creative, public, and open-source computational work. Our work is inspired by John Dewey’s emphasis on art as a fundamental form of human experience. And yes, learning through inventing — even when you are learning “hard science” — is an art.

The hacked guitar was a collaboration led by my students, Weston Sandberg and Robert Brown. The idea is pretty simple, as the Arduino folks broke it down on their Tumblr page: #Guitar with #Arduino and capacitive touch sensors to trigger pre-recorded loops. You can see and read how to build your own hacked guitar on Github and Instructables.