The Immersive Guitar is at once a whimsy, an oversized guitar-shaped building, an intimate concert space, a feat of engineering, a display of sustainability and most importantly, a brand new, immersive musical instrument with unique tonal and acoustic properties. What began as internationally renown guitarist Karin Schaupp’s fantastical dream of wanting to step inside her guitar, soon evolved into a design and building journey by a design team comprising architect Bruce Wolfe, engineer Dr Hassan Karampour, luthier Jim Redgate and artistic co-director percussionist and composer Professor Vanessa Tomlinson. The outcome is an innovative and artistically inspiring instrument capable of making new sounds and enabling musicians and audiences alike to re-evaluate what a guitar can be.

building the immersive guitar

xxxxx

How do you play TIG?

The Immersive Guitar is played (as the name suggests) from the inside. Both the performer/s and the audience are inside the instrument. In a sense, the guitar has been turned inside out and the strings are therefore inside the body of the guitar over the performer’s head. Despite the absence of a fretboard, the instrument can produce a 3-octave-plus pitch range using harmonics, plucked open notes, pizzicato plucked notes with pinch stopping and/or a bottle slide. TIG’s strings can be plucked, bowed, hit or flicked and the body of the instrument and its soundboxes offer a large repertoire of percussive sounds. Given the resonant quality and increased sustain of TIG it offers a powerful playing experience for a range of musical outcomes.

What music did you compose for TIG?

Musically speaking, TIG is not a super-sized guitar, but instead an entirely new instrument with new sonic and performative characteristics.

“TIG’s Groove” was the first piece - playing open string grooves that highlighted the amazing bass sound, accompanied by percussive explorations of the body of the instrument. To explore pitch variation, slide bottle techniques were incorporated and our playing approach developed in “Love in a Bottle”. The use of rattan sticks on the strings, coupled with fingered frets gave a rhythmic disco feel with micro movements of the stick opening up worlds of overtones. Bows also became a way to vibrate the entire inner space of TIG – soundwaves that could be felt when touching the body of TIG. Check out “Love in a Bottle” (above).

What was the audience reaction to TIG?

TIG offers a truly immersive experience to its audiences, as people are literally surrounded by sound bouncing between the curved walls in all directions. The instrument is substantially (several-fold) louder than a conventional classical concert guitar.

Audience members are able to feel the sound vibrations along the inner walls by leaning on the walls or placing their hands on the inner walls. Musical interaction between the audience and the performers is encouraged as even lay-people can produce a beautiful resonant plucked or bowed sound and/or explore the rich percussive opportunities of the instrument. Of course, many choose to simply sit back and enjoy the loud warm tone of the new music created especially for and by TIG.