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.
PDF: https://andreasfender.com/publications/PDFs/GuitarPie_author...
Pie Menu:
Combining the GuitarPie with the Voystick (vocal joystick) would rock!
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...
Cool! And your last name is Fender.
Also this funky citation:
Markus Funk, Vanessa Tobisch, and Adam Emfield. 2020. Non-Verbal Auditory Input for Controlling Binary, Discrete, and Continuous Input in Automotive User Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Honolulu, HI, USA) (CHI ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376816
Talk about nominative determinism! Fender and Funk?
This is cool, but I'm having a hard time seeing this working in a real product.
Guitarists have been using their picking hand or pedal controls since the beginning of the electric guitar without much fuss or concern.
I also thought pie menus died off because everyone decided they were too limited, hard to understand, and overall annoying regardless of the input method.
Ha ha, you must not be aware of graphics tools like Blender, Maya, Rhino, Krita, SolidWorks, etc, or games like The Sims, Secret of Mana, Neverwinter Nights, Crysis, Mass Effect, Battlefield, etc.
"Hard to understand" is on you, buddy. I wasn't aware that "everyone" got together and agreed on everything -- that seems like a suspicious claim. Where did you read that? Surely you can cite some papers and article by "everyone" as evidence, and you're just not making it up in an attempt to troll.