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The electric guitar has been a core element of popular music for much of the past century. Pickups are the components that turn vibrations from the strings into electricity for sound and can be seen as the "heart" of the instrument. Electric guitarists have long known that the magnetic force from pickups affects the quality of their sound and how smoothly the sound transitions, known as timbre. Takuto Yudasaka, visiting scholar at McGill University and researcher at Yamaha, present their work on the physics behind electric guitar pickups Wednesday, May 15, at 10:30 a.m. EDT as part of a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Canadian Acoustical Association, held May 13–17 at the Shaw Center located in downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. "In electric guitars, the vibration of a magnetized string generates an electric current in the pickup coil," said Yudasaka. "This current is very weak, but by winding the coil thousands of times, more signal can be detected."