About the electric guitar: a cross-disciplinary context for an acoustical study

Overview & Synopsis

The electric guitar was born in the 1930s from the will of guitarists to be heard while playing in orchestras including louder instruments. It then became the broadly-spread instrument that we know. Because of its mass-production and of the imitation-like learning methods, it appears that only a few models (shape, woods species, construction parameters) of electric guitar have stood out and have been the master copies of most of the other electric guitars all around the world. These models are few but each of them strongly differs from the others organologically or sociologically speaking. A new research topic is emerging at LAM, which is about the vibro-acoustical study of the electric guitar in connection with lutherie. In this article, this topic is put back in an organological, scientific, musicological, sociological and economic context context.