Demo Hour

DEMO HOUR: The Carolan Guitar

Named after the Irish bard Turlough O'Carolan, the Carolan Guitar is a roving collector and teller of stories. Scanning its decorative inlay (Artcodes) or playing fragments of music (Muzicodes) conjures up stories from its digital footprint of how it was made, where it has been, and who has played it. From a research perspective, Carolan is an "accountable artifact," a physical object that can be easily connected to multiple layers of digital content so that it can tell different stories to different people in different contexts. From an impact perspective, it is a hybrid product that blends goods, services, and experiences to enhance provenance, utility, and personal meaning.

Greenhalgh, C., Benford, S., and Hazzard, A. and Chamberlain, A. Playing fast and loose with music recognition. Proc. of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, 2017, 4302–4313.

Benford, S., Hazzard, A., Chamberlain, A., Glover, K., Greenhalgh, C., Xu, L., Hoare, M., and Darzentas, D. Accountable artefacts: The case of the Carolan guitar. Proc. of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, 2016, 1163–1175.

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/mixedrealitylab/

https://carolanguitar.com/

https://youtu.be/GwgnAB5tq1U - laser etching Carolan's front

Steve Benford, Adrian Hazzard, Alan Chamberlain, Dimitri Darzentas, and Juan Martinez Avila, The University of Nottingham
[email protected]

(Left) Carolan's unusual removable sound-hole featuring a scannable Artcode; (Right) Scanning an Artcode that is physically cut into Carolan's soundboard.

Capturing Carolan's voice in the recording studio.