Automatar: Intelligent AI Guitar

The Automatar is an intelligent AI-powered bass guitar born to bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds.

While the instrument functions on some level similarly to any fretted string instrument like a guitar or bass, it innovatively and unprecedentedly is built around an NVIDIA GPU physically embedded within it that imbues the instrument itself with a form of intelligence, enabling it to understand how it’s being played and vibrate its own strings in response via an onboard AI model. As a human musician plays the main set of four strings, the instrument electromagnetically actuates itself to harmonize and react in turn.

The Automatar may be AI-powered, but unlike almost all AI systems, it is an entirely acoustic (besides amplification) instrument. There are no speakers and no sound synthesis – the strings actually vibrate electromagnetically. In this way, the Automatar merges the warring worlds of musical tradition which features acoustic instruments with the new AI paradigm of generation sound using prompting and other disembodied methods.

What comes next when so much of human creativity can be replicated instantly by machines? How can we shape technology to preserve our relationship with the past and with the old ways of making music that humans have used for thousands of years?

The Automatar is an AI musical instrument, but one that respects the craft and tradition of making and playing physical musical instruments. Crafted painstakingly entirely from scratch, the Automatar is part of a tradition of musical instruments that can be owned, hacked, and operated without subscription fees, data surveillance, and other common attributes of modern “tools”.

The human is centered and respected, and the Automatar is merely just a conduit towards their own expression without forcing an external will on the player.