GuitarPie: Using the Fretboard of an Electric Guitar for Audio-Based Pie Menu Interaction
ACM UIST 2025
Frank Heyen, Marius Labudda, Michael Sedlmair, Andreas Fender
Nowadays, electric guitars are often used together with digital interfaces. For instance, tablature applications can support guitar practice by rendering and playing back the tabs of individual instrument tracks of a song (guitar, drums, etc.). However, those interfaces are typically controlled via mouse and keyboard or via touch input. This means that controlling and configuring playback during practice can lead to high switching costs, as learners often need to switch between playing and interface control. In this paper, we explore the use of audio input from an unmodified electric guitar to enable interface control without letting go of the guitar. We present GuitarPie, an audio-based pie menu interaction method. GuitarPie utilizes the grid-like structure of a fretboard to spatially represent audio-controlled operations, avoiding the need to memorize note sequences. Furthermore, we implemented TabCtrl, a tablature interface that uses GuitarPie and other audio-based interaction methods for interface control.
Keyboard and voice navigation, analog "voystick" vocal joystick formant/pitch tracking:
Voystick:
https://github.com/elisaoh/mypystick
Vocal Joystick:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXmccs4GIqI
Vocal Joystick Home Page:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100626050314/http://ssli.ee.wa...
University of Washington: Department of Linguistic: The Vocal Joystick
https://linguistics.washington.edu/research/projects-and-gra...
ACM UIST 2025
Frank Heyen, Marius Labudda, Michael Sedlmair, Andreas Fender
Nowadays, electric guitars are often used together with digital interfaces. For instance, tablature applications can support guitar practice by rendering and playing back the tabs of individual instrument tracks of a song (guitar, drums, etc.). However, those interfaces are typically controlled via mouse and keyboard or via touch input. This means that controlling and configuring playback during practice can lead to high switching costs, as learners often need to switch between playing and interface control. In this paper, we explore the use of audio input from an unmodified electric guitar to enable interface control without letting go of the guitar. We present GuitarPie, an audio-based pie menu interaction method. GuitarPie utilizes the grid-like structure of a fretboard to spatially represent audio-controlled operations, avoiding the need to memorize note sequences. Furthermore, we implemented TabCtrl, a tablature interface that uses GuitarPie and other audio-based interaction methods for interface control.
PDF: https://andreasfender.com/publications/PDFs/GuitarPie_author...
Pie Menu:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1