128. Digital Identities

We’re delighted to have published this article on “Augmenting Musical Instruments with Digital Identities” in the Journal of New Music Research about how augmenting musical instruments, especially guitars, with digital identities can enhance provenance, creative practice, and personal meaning [1].

We begin with a literature review that reveals the importance of identities to physical things, how such identities can be digitally augmented, but also that this idea has not been widely applied to musical instruments. We then report interviews with guitarists that offer insights into the controversial practice of physically relicing guitars as a way of enhancing their identities. Finally, we report on the lessons learned from fourteen years of creating and sharing our own Carolan guitar. Reflecting across all of this, we reconsider musical instruments to be what academics call ‘product-service systems’ in which physical instruments come bundled with digital services that forge, perform, and share their identities.

[1] Benford, S., McGarry, G., Hazzard, A., Chamberlain, A., Gibson, R. and Martinez Avila, J.P., 2024. Augmenting musical instruments with digital identities. Journal of New Music Research, pp.1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2024.2423613

Originally posted at https://carolanguitar.com/2025/05/05/128-digital-identities/