building the immersive guitar
(text and images drawn from Conrad Gargett)
The brief was fantastical, the experience is inspiring. The Immersive Guitar at Brisbane’s Curiocity festival is the world’s largest acoustic guitar where you feel the vibrations and listen from inside the belly of the instrument.
The Immersive Guitar is an innovative and experimental work celebrating a tangible connection between instrument and architecture. Positioned just metres from Queensland Conservatorium and Queensland Performing Arts Centre, it provides an alternate, unique and intimate performance venue aimed to inspire and resonate with listeners.
The design is informed by an inventive approach to music composition. As an instrument, it is designed to be played. Musicians and visitors alike create sounds by reaching up and plucking the strings which are strung across the sound hole and acoustically amplified by several soundboxes. As a performance space, the 25-person audience is rewarded with a novel, intimate setting that affords a deeper understanding of the instrument.
Made from sandwiched panels of plantation grown Queensland Hoop Pine and supported on a structural steel frame, The Immersive Guitar has an approximate size of 5.2m long x 4.3m wide and 2m high. The portable space can be transported on a 3-tonne truck and erected indoors or outdoors.
“…there is a philosophical commitment in this project to highlight technology and innovation in venue design without resource to electronic intervention: to use form and fabrication of an oversized acoustic guitar as a fitting environment to engage a listener in the ‘liveness’ of sound, the resonance of space, the presence of material actuality and the dynamic interaction of plater with instrument, on a human scale.”
