Man delivers first self-playing guitar

PEORIA, Ill. (WEEK/Gray News) - After seven years of hard work, a man delivered his first self-playing guitar on Sunday.

Michael Kuzma has played guitar his whole life. He said the idea started as an idea in his dorm room.

After studying electrical engineering at Bradley University, Kuzma found a way to combine that knowledge with his passion for the guitar to create one that can play music by itself.

Kuzma delivered his first Kuzma Self-Playing Guitar at Eat and Evolve in Junction City Shopping Center in Peoria, Illinois, on Sunday.

“The roots started here, so it’s naturally, the right progression and makes sense that the first delivered Kuzma Self-Playing Guitar will exist here in Peoria,” Kuzma said. “That’s a very big step of, ‘Hey, I’ve been working on this for so long, and I finally built one from scratch, start to finish, in two months and then put it in this restaurant, and I won’t be able to touch it very easily from that point on,’ so it’s a big milestone and a big step something that’s definitely very very very exciting.”

Kuzma said his self-playing guitar can play any song.

He described the process by saying the sheet music is the input and by using a software translator, the guitar can understand the sheet music and play the song.

Kuzma said the guitar won’t play the song the same way a human would because it has its own style, but it can perform the robotic best attempt of any song he wants.

“I went from no music to playing one song, and through that learning, once you have one string, you multiply to three, multiply to six, and it gets much easier to iterate with the baseline knowledge already established,” Kuzma said. “At this point now, I’m almost following the musician’s journey, where at the start of learning any instrument, you learn very quickly, and you learn how to start playing songs, but to actually master it, it takes a very significant amount of time to add that nuance and artistic texture, that’s what the Kuzma Self-Playing Guitar is at now.”

Over the years of mastering the technology, Kuzma said the most exciting part is having his guitar perform like an artist and doing it in the most enjoyable ways.

“It does fun things, and it’s going to continue to do interesting things, and it’s going to keep challenging, ‘Hey, what is the coolest thing you can possibly do with this technology?’ and that’s probably what excites me most about this endeavor,” Kuzma said.

Other than mastering the overall output of the Self-Playing Guitar, Kuzma said his next steps are to improve the dynamics of the technology and software, add artificial intelligence and challenge its capabilities.

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