Virtual Air Guitar (VAG) homepage



Soulful playing


What is the Virtual Air Guitar?

A combination of hand-held controllers and a guitar synthesizer is called here the "Virtual Air Guitar" (VAG). The name refers to playing an "air guitar", i.e., just acting the playing with music playback, and the term virtual refers to making a playable synthetic instrument. Playing "Real" Air Guitar (with no instrument) has become popular through the annual Air Guitar World Championship Contest in air guitar playing in Oulu, Finland.

At Helsinki University of Technology, laboratories of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing and Telecommunication Software and Multimedia, we are developing various versions of the VAG. Motivation comes from the challenge to study and develop sound source modeling, sound synthesis by physics-based modeling, user interfacing to virtual reality, and virtual reality applications. A specific target of development is also an exhibition on music and sound, planned for 2005 in HEUREKA, the Finnish Science Centre.

In our experimental VAG implementations sensing of the left hand position is used for pitch control, the right hand movements for plucking, and the finger positions of both hands can in some interfaces be used for other features of sound production. The synthetic guitar algorithm supports electric as well as acoustic sounds (electric guitar in demos below), augmented with sound effects and intelligent mapping from playing gestures to synthesis parameters. Realizations and experiments of the VAG are described in pdf document "Virtual Air Guitar".

Virtual Air Guitar demos

Several demos of air guitar playing as video files can be streamed or downloaded from here: