Understanding the vibrotactile feedback of the electric guitar - Methodology for a physical and perceptual study.

The purpose of this paper is to report on an ongoing experimental work on vibratory feedback perception, in the case of the solid body electric guitar. The aim of this work is to understand the link between effective vibrotactile information transmitted to the body of the musician, through a reproduction of the real vibratory signal (when guitar players pluck the strings) thanks to actuators. The experiment conducted for this work shows similarities between the two signals (plucked-string excitation and re-injected excitation) and in each case, the frequencies near the string’s fundamental and partial components clearly emerge in the vibration measurements. Perceptual tests must be conducted to understand which contribution (string or guitar body modes) is the most important regarding the musician’s perception, and these tests will be conducted to link the results to the human perception.