A student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created an instrument that's said to be capable of sounding like a variety of different guitars.
Billed as a 'Chameleon Guitar', this has a removable soundboard - the idea is that you can slot in 'boards made of different wood to produce a wide range of tones.
This isn't the end of the story, though: sound from the pickups is sent to a computer, which then emulates the effect of a user-definable size and shape of resonating chamber.
The guitar is the work of Amit Zoran, who claims that a player could easily switch soundboards during the course of a gig.
"The original signal is not synthetic, it's acoustic," says Zoran. "Then we can simulate different shapes, or a bigger instrument. We can make a guitar the size of a mountain."
Amit plans to continue developing the guitar as part of a thesis project for his master's degree. After that, he may attempt to turn it into a commercial product.
Check out the MIT website for a video of the Chameleon Guitar in action.
