The Chameleon Guitar, developed at the MIT Media Lab, presents a unique combination of traditional acoustic values and digital abilities. This is a real hybrid machine; a computer reads acoustic information from a wooden heart (resonator) to create new sound experience. This is an academic research project, and not a commercial one; hopefully it will influence others to explore what lies between our physical world and computers.

Today’s musical instruments fall into three very distinct classes, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. Traditional acoustic instruments offer richness and uniqueness of qualities that result from the unique properties of the physical materials of which they are made. The hand crafted construction qualities are very important here. Electric guitars are highly expressive tools that relay on their structure and materials. In contrast, computer based instruments lack this richness, uniqueness and expressivity; they produce very predictable and generic results, but offer the advantage of flexibility: they can be many instruments in one. The Chameleon Guitar presents a new approach of designing and building instruments, which attempts to combine the best of all. The approach is characterized by sampling the resonator's physical matter and its acoustic properties and complemented by a physically simulated, a virtual shape or other digital effects. This approach to building digital objects maintains some of the rich qualities and variation found in real instruments (the result of natural materials combined with hand crafted elements) with the flexibility and open-endedness of digital ones.

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