Musical instrument recordings made with a fiber Fabry-Perot cavity: photonic guitar pickup

Nicholas Ballard, Daniel Paz-Soldan, Peter Kung, Hans-Peter Loock
2010 Applied Optics  
A 1 cm long, low-finesse fiber-optic cavity was used as a transducer for the vibrations of the soundboard of an acoustic guitar and of a violin. The reflected light is detected and then amplified and recorded using conventional audio instrumentation. The fiber-optic pickup is found to have a high response range in both amplitude (up to 100 μm displacement) and audio frequency (DC to 20 kHz) and good linearity up to a displacement of 225 μm. The audio noise is found to arise from the fiber-optic
more » ... cables and, to a lesser extent, from the laser and laser driver.
doi:10.1364/ao.49.002198 pmid:20390023 fatcat:rsyaqp4esbchnprzofp3n5auky