Black Hole Multifunctional Guitar by Shaheen Pouladvar and Shahram Pouladvar is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2019 Silver A' Design Award in Musical Instruments Design Competition Category.
SilverMusical Instrument· 2019
Black Hole Multifunctional Guitar
by Shaheen Pouladvar and Shahram Pouladvar
Client: Pouladvar Design Group
Silver A' Design Award Winner in Musical Instrument Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #79653The Design
About Black Hole Multifunctional Guitar
The black hole is a multi functional guitar based on hard rock and metal music styles. The body shape gives the guitar players feeling of comfort. It's equipped with a liquid crystal display on the fretboard to generate visual effects and learning programs. Braille signs behind the guitar's neck, can help people who are blind or have low vision to play guitar.
The Recognition
About the Silver A' Design Award
Black Hole Multifunctional Guitar is a Silver A' Design Award winner, an extraordinarily prestigious recognition granted to top-of-the-line, gorgeous, and impressive designs. Silver winners are tremendously brilliant and exceedingly creative works that illustrate the outstanding expertise, talent, and acuity of their designers. Black Hole Multifunctional Guitar is expected to be a wonderful, showpiece work that is remarkably professional and profoundly innovative. This Silver A' Design Award-winning design is a highly notable, admired invention that benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Black Hole Multifunctional Guitar is a vastly envied creation that evokes desires, introduces positive feelings, and sparks amazement and wonderment.
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Design Interview
What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?
The unique design of the body is based on the hard rock and metal music, which is also include very smart science of ergonomics.The presence of an LCD on the fretboard, which adds to BlackHole's particular functionality.Fret markers behind the guitar neck with braille signs, can help people who are blind or have low vision, to find frets. This function even makes professionals to play guitar easier. Existence of a controller on guitar’s body, allows the player to instantly change the monitor's images.In Black Hole, we have inspired especially those like motorhead, metallica and slayer, and guitars such as jackson kelly jackson randy rhodes and gibson explorer and james hetfield’s signatures.
What has been your main focus in designing this work? Especially what did you want to achieve?
Integration of design based on rock and metal music of the 80's and 90's with technology of the day.
What are your future plans for this award winning design?
To finalize this project.
Grand Interview
Your innovative integration of a liquid crystal display on the Black Hole Multifunctional Guitar's fretboard represents a significant advancement in guitar technology - could you elaborate on how this feature transforms the learning and performance experience for musicians?
Learning: One of the challenges in the learning phase is reading notes and guitar tabs from a computer or a piece of paper while also finding the correct position of each note on the guitar's fretboard. To address this, an LCD screen integrated into the fretboard can help learners locate the notes as fast as possible.Additionally, learners can become familiar with various rhythms during their practice through visual effects that highlight kick downbeats or hi-hat backbeats, thus aiding them in maintaining correct timing, just like a metronome does.Practicing: One of the outstanding features of this guitar is that it allows musicians to save time spent on practice. They can arrange their practice sessions in any order they prefer.Guitarists can not only save and reorganize their sessions, but they can also store rhythms, cues, and pieces of music. This includes different visual effects tailored to their needs and enhancing their coordination during rehearsals.Performing: In performing mode, the LCD on the fretboard displays visual effects based on the emotion conveyed by music notes. We illustrated this in our video. [Video link: https://youtube.com/shorts/gldticrLzDs?si=u_LJJqU7xhVtRcUU]Imagine a lively performance with music riffs and solos being played on stage, simultaneously, the display on the guitar's fretboard shows images and videos that reflect the sensations and emotions of each performer through these visual effects.Syncing different instruments during a performance allows musicians to exchange cues seamlessly. For instance, if a drummer wants to signal the band to start playing a practiced piece or to switch to improvisation, the LCD changes color or lights up with a specific effect, providing a clue that a change is about to occur. This feature promotes coordination among band members, enhancing the overall performance.
The Black Hole Multifunctional Guitar's body design draws inspiration from iconic hard rock and metal guitars - how did your extensive experience in these genres influence the ergonomic and aesthetic decisions in creating this unique instrument?
With over 20 years of experience and extensive research in the design industry, especially in the automotive category, our team has developed innovative designs. We have successfully used our experience to create a modern guitar design, drawing on our collective expertise.Traditionally, guitar designs have been limited to simple geometric shapes and graphics on their bodies. However, we believe that the appearance of a guitar can transcend vintage surfaces. We recognized a gap between traditional guitar designs in the hard rock and metal genres and modern industrial designs.As a team, we have owned and analyzed many original guitar designs. Our experience includes over 100 performances on various stages, including the 1st Persian metal festival, as well as theatrical compositions in different plays and art projects. Our passion for technology and ongoing developments in this field have significantly influenced our industrial design approach, which has inspired the concept of this guitar.
What inspired you to incorporate Braille signs behind the Black Hole Multifunctional Guitar's neck, and how does this inclusive design element enhance accessibility for visually impaired musicians while benefiting all players?
Based on our research, we believe those who are visually impaired or have no vision can significantly enhance their other senses, particularly their hearing.One of the biggest challenges for guitar players is locating the fret numbers on the fretboard. This challenge is solved for sighted people with graphic signs on the guitar neck, but there is no solution for blind people.To address this issue, we proposed adding braille marks on the back of the guitar neck.This addition would help blind players overcome their difficulties in identifying fret positions. Additionally, sighted individuals would also benefit from the tactile nature of these markings, allowing them to find the correct finger positions more quickly.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- Design of the body is based on the hard rock and metal music, which is also include science of ergonomics. The presence of a liquid crystal display on the fretboard, which adds to Black hole's functionality. Fret markers behind the guitar neck with braille signs, can help people who are blind or have low vision, to find frets. This function even makes professionals to play guitar easier. Existence of a controller on guitar’s body, allows the player to instantly change the monitor's images.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- 1118mm height x 423mm width x 93mm depth
- Tags
- Guitar, Electric Guitar, LCD Fretboard, Black hole, Guitars, Visualization Riffs Solos
- Production Technology
- We started with sketching on paper and implementation thoughts with digital sketching and got a basic look. By doing several reforms and trying to optimize the final design, we use catia software to make sure Black hole was producible. After rendering with keyshot software, we got to the final look. We created the video with final cut pro software and compose a song especially for this project.
- Design Challenge
- Broader research to optimize early ideas is always a hard way. Of course, it is acceptable that there is always need greater hardness and effort to be optimized and matured.
- Research
- The design of the guitar has hitherto been more limited to simple geometric volumes and fixed graphics on its body. While we thought that the appearance of the guitar would not be limited to the silent face no more. Considering the technology of the day, the smaller and lighter electrical parts that use in mobile phones as you see. We decided to integrate the technology of the day with a unique design of 80s music styles based on our experiences.
- Inspiration
- Our two-person design team, which has 10 years of product design experience and 19 years of electric guitar playing, composed and performed in rock and metal styles, has gained experience in finding the appropriate reasons for combining these experiences. In Black hole, we have inspired hard rock and heavy metal & thrash metal styles, especially those like motorhead, metallica and slayer, and guitars such as jackson kelly jackson randy rhodes and gibson explorer and james hetfield’s guitar signatures.
- Project Duration
- This project started in November 2018 until March 2019, in Tehran Iran
- Operation Flow
- The idea of the display on the fretboard has several modes:
Learning, Practicing, Performing,
In learning mode, musician can learn guitar lessons that especially designed for the Black hole. They can save data in guitar's memory and learn it from the display. In practice mode, musician can practice guitar patterns. In performing mode, Imagine when the music riffs & solos playing on stage, the guitar displays images, associated with music sensation and shows the excitement inside it on display. - Team Members
- Designer: Shaheen Pouladvar
Designer: Shahram Pouladvar - Image Credits
- image#1 : Creator shaheen pouladvar, shahram pouladvar, Black hole, 2019
image#2 : Creator shaheen pouladvar, shahram pouladvar, Black hole, 2019
image#3 : Creator shaheen pouladvar, Black hole sketches, 2019
image#4 : Creator shaheen pouladvar, shahram pouladvar, Black hole, 2019
image#5 : Creator shaheen pouladvar, shahram pouladvar, Black hole , 2019
Video Credits : shahram pouladvar, music by shahram pouladvar (song name : time), 2019
Music Performer : shahram pouladvar
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