Influence of the Electric Guitar's Fingerboard Wood on Guitarists' Perception

Abstract

The sound of a solid body electric guitar comes from the loudspeaker transducing into sound the string velocity. Because of mechanical string-structure coupling, the string vibration, and therefore the sound, substantially depends on the lutherie parameters. This study focuses on the comparison between ebony-fingerboard and rosewood-fingerboard guitars: is a change in the fingerboard wood perceived by the guitar players? In order to test the hypothesis that it is actually perceived, a psychological investigation is carried out. Two experimental methods are used: a free sorting task with recorded stimuli from the guitars (listening test) and a free verbalisation task where the guitarists play the guitars. In the listening test, the guitarists perceive differences between guitars, but the resulting clusters do not show an ebony/rosewood dichotomy. A linguistic analysis of the verbalisations exhibits psychological descriptors that are relevant for the discrimination of the wood of the fingerboard: PRECISION (referring to how each note stands out from others), and to a lesser extent ATTACK (referring to the guitar's response to musician's gesture) and BALANCE (referring to the frequency content). This study is part of a broader project aiming at establishing an explicite relation between mechanics, perception, and lutherie. A physical interpretation of the psychologically-relevant descriptors is eventually proposed in order to use them as hypotheses in a further hypothetico-deductive approach starting from physics and using psychophysical methods.