Adapting polyphonic pickup technology for spatial music performance

This paper describes how polyphonic pickup technology can be adapted for the spatialization of electric stringed instruments such as the violin, cello and guitar. It is pro-posed that mapping the individual strings to different spa-tial locations integrates the spatial diffusion process with the standard musical gestures of the performer. The devel-opment of polyphonic guitar processing is discussed and a method of adapting MIDI guitar technology for this pur-pose is presented. The compositional and technical strata-gies used with various augmented instruments is presented along with an analysis of three compositions by the author for spatialized hexaphonic guitar