Investigating the vocabulary used by electric guitar players to speak about touch

Playing music is a multimodal experience, involving cross modal interactions between auditory, visual and tactile perceptions. The classical approach to analyse multimodal perception is to uncouple the modalities. This kind of approach exposes test participants to non-natural situations. The sound of the electric guitar usually comes from the amplifier, but the vibrations are felt directly on the instrument, i.e. the electric guitar player naturally experiences a situation where auditory and vibrotactile feedbacks are already partially uncoupled. The electric guitar seems therefore to be a good candidate to study multimodal perception in an ecological setting. This presentation reports on preliminary experiments. First, a survey is conducted in order to investigate how electric guitar players feel and evaluate the vibrotactile feedback of their instrument, what vibratory features are expected when choosing an instrument, and how important these vibrations are for the perceived sound quality. Second, a perceptual test is being conducted in the form of a playing task where the auditory feedback (amplifier) is modified independently of the vibrotactile feedback (guitar that is being played), in order to show the interaction between vibrotactile feedback and sound perception.