Joel Ong, Frank Chen and Justin Leow from Cornell University built this Programmable Synthesized Guitar for their ECE 4760 Final Project.

“Our basic idea is to model an acoustic guitar as closely as possible and then implement additional functions not available to the conventional guitar. This includes allowing the play of the guitar with sound being output to earphones, allowing for practice without disturbing others, as well as a chord-learning mechanism based on LED-signalled instructions and other functions. A close modeling would mean that we use push buttons to simulate actual depressing of strings at specific fret locations, calibrate vibration sensors to detect strumming of guitar strings, and faithfully recreate a representation of the guitar body. For the production of guitar strumming sounds, we used the Karplus-Strong algorithm that synthesizes a plucked string sound signal.”

via abbtech