magpick: an augmented guitar pick for nuanced control
TRANSCRIPT
Magpick: an Augmented Guitar Pick for Nuanced Control
Fabio MorrealeCreative Arts and Industries
University of Auckland,New Zealand
Andrea GuidiCentre For Digital Music
Queen Mary University ofLondon, UK
Andrew McPhersonCentre For Digital Music
Queen Mary University ofLondon, UK
ABSTRACTThis paper introduces the Magpick, an augmented pick forelectric guitar that uses electromagnetic induction to sensethe motion of the pick with respect to the permanent mag-nets in the guitar pickup. The Magpick provides the gui-tarist with nuanced control of the sound that coexists withtraditional plucking-hand technique. The paper presentsthree ways that the signal from the pick can modulate theguitar sound, followed by a case study of its use in which11 guitarists tested the Magpick for five days and composeda piece with it. Reflecting on their comments and experi-ences, we outline the innovative features of this technologyfrom the point of view of performance practice. In partic-ular, compared to other augmentations, the high tempo-ral resolution, low latency, and large dynamic range of theMagpick support a highly nuanced control over the sound.Our discussion highlights the utility of having the locus ofaugmentation coincide with the locus of interaction.
Author KeywordsAugmented instrument, magnetic sensing, subtlety, nuance,locus of interaction, ancillary gestures sensing
CCS Concepts•Applied computing → Sound and music comput-ing; Performing arts; •Hardware → Sensor devices andplatforms;
1. INTRODUCTIONIn virtually all musical instruments, the set of gestural fea-tures that contribute to the production of sound is boundedby the physical constraints of actuation. In the case of theguitar, even if we were to consider the movements of the picksolely, only those involving an interaction with the strings(e.g. plucking and releasing the string, sliding on the string)actually have an effect on the sound [23]. Many other nat-urally occurring gestures, the so called ancxillary gestures,could potentially be used to control sound production [6,23]. For instance, continuing with the example of the gui-tar, the movements of the pick pre- and post-pluck and themovements of the pick above the strings could be used asperformance material.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Copyrightremains with the author(s).
NIME’19, June 3-6, 2019, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul,Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Figure 1: The Magpick is composed of two parts: ahollow body (black) and a cap (brass).
The challenge is to find ways to sense the movement ofthe pick with respect to the guitar with high resolution,high dynamic range, and low latency, then use the resultingsignal in a way that is compatible with existing guitar tech-nique. Ideally, the pick should also be minimally invasiveand should not require additional hardware to be installedon the guitar.
The Magpick (Figure 1) is an augmented guitar pick (plec-trum) that consists of a hollowed custom-designed pick withseveral loops of wire embedded within it. When the pickmoves within an ambient magnetic field, such as that cre-ated by the permanent magnets in an electric guitar pickup,an electromotive force (voltage) is induced in the coil, whichis proportional to the rate of change in magnetic flux. Inthe context of guitar playing, this signal is related to thespeed of movement, the angle of the pick with respect tothe guitar body, and the proximity of the pick to the pick-ups. As a consequence, the voltage generated in the wireembedded in the pick de facto provides information aboutthe gestures of the plucking hand.
The wire is connected to a small preamplifier embeddedin a box that can be worn on the wrist. The output ofthe preamplifier is connected to a Bela audio processor [10],where it is combined with the signal from the guitar toproduce a new output signal that modifies or extends thesound of the guitar. This solution accurately responds tothe speed, location, and intensity of the pick movementsin the pickup area with a wide dynamic range. Especiallyimportant is the fact that the signal in the pick is also gen-erated by motion above the strings (not touching them) aswell as by strums and plucks.
In the next section we present existing attempts to aug-ment guitars and guitar picks, then in Section 3 we detailthe technological implementation of the Magpick. In Sec-tion 4 we present a user study with 11 guitarists, who usedthe Magpick over a period of 5 days. The findings and impli-cations are discussed in Section 5, and Section 6 summarisesthe contributions of this paper and presents possible futuredirections.
2. RELATED WORKThe Magpick is situated within an approach to digital in-strument design where a focus on subtlety, nuance, or con-trol intimacy [24] takes priority over the navigation of high-dimensional parameter spaces. Tanaka [18] observed of thesubtlety of acoustic instruments that “the clarity of interac-tion then goes beyond the simple question of parameter andevent mapping of ‘what controls what’ to a more high-levelanalysis of how different gestural inputs are used to derivethe different types of articulative signals.” A recent trendhas been the development of instruments with continuousaudio-rate sampling of relatively few control signals (oftenonly one) [22, 12, 17], from which a rich gestural languagecan translate into the articulation of complex signals whosemusical output is readily grasped in an enactive way [24]even if the digital system makes no attempt to segment orclassify the gestures producing the signals.
Turning specifically to the guitar, the potential of tech-nology to extend its possibilities has a long commercial andacademic history. Particular emphasis since the early 1980’shas been given to augmenting the guitar rather than thepick [15], including Zeta Mirror and Roland GK-series MIDIguitars using hexaphonic pickups, or the more recent MoogGuitar and Vo-96 that electromagnetically actuate the gui-tar strings. Electromagnetic string actuation, which firstcame to prominence in the guitar world with the 1978 EBow[1], remains a regular topic of research at NIME [8]. The in-terested reader can find a recent review of augmented guitarsystems in [11].
With respect to augmented guitar picks, there is a longhistory of various sensors being integrated into picks, mostlyusing force, bend and vibration sensors, or electrical con-tacts with the strings. One of the first examples of sensor-augmented guitar pick dates to 1977: The Raymond Lee Or-ganization patented a guitar pick containing a microphone[4]. A 2014 patent of an augmented guitar pick [3] shows aphysical pick design containing a cavity to hold an electronicsensor. In 2007 Vanegas presented at NIME a MIDI pickthat uses a force-sensing resistor on a guitar pick to controlmusical events via MIDI [21]. In order to control differentaspects of the performance, the player has to vary the pres-sure on the guitar pick. Although this is a clever solutionto control the augmentation from the pick itself, it obligesguitarists to learn and perform unconventional gestures.
The most recent augmented guitar pick is the PLXTRMby Vets et al. [23]. PLXTRM is a sensor-enabled guitarpick that includes an accelerometer, a piezo vibration sen-sor, and a copper surface intended to make electrical contactwith the strings. It is used with a guitar pickup featuring aseparate audio output for each string and with a digital sig-nal processing system designed to detect gestures from thepick. By comparison, the Magpick uses a different sensortechnology that works with any pickup and does not requireany additional installation on the guitar.
The Magpick works by sensing changes in magnetic field.Electric guitars have one or more pickups below the stringsin the area where guitarists typically strum. Each pickupcontains a set of high-strength permanent magnets that pro-duce an ambient magnetic field around the pickup that ex-tends above the strings. The motion of the Magpick throughthis field generates an electrical signal that provides infor-mation about the gestures of the guitarist’s plucking handin the vicinity of the pickups.
3. TECHNOLOGY AND DESIGNThe pick itself contains a hollow channel with 4 loops of cop-per magnet wire around the interior perimeter (Figure 2).
Figure 2: The architecture of the Magpick system.
By Faraday’s Law, a change in the magnetic flux throughthe loop enclosed by the wire will generate an electric volt-age proportional to the rate of change. This is the same ba-sic principle that underlies every magnetic pickup, includingthe pickups in the electric guitar, but its application in theMagpick presents an engineering challenge for two reasons.First, the signal of interest is generated by the movement ofthe Magpick relative to the permanent magnets in a nearbyguitar pickup. The Magpick is operated by human hands,so its speed of motion will be relatively low compared to thevelocity of a vibrating string. Second, the Magpick containsonly a few turns of wire, instead of the hundreds or thou-sands of turns found in most magnetic pickups. Since thegenerated voltage is proportional to both the rate of changeof magnetic flux and to the number of turns, the outputof the Magpick will be much smaller than other magneticpickups, on the order of microvolts.
3.1 Sensor DesignTo maintain a usable signal-to-noise ratio with such a smallsignal, two specialised amplifier circuits were created of dif-ferent topology. Figure 3a is a non-inverting proportionalamplifier of gain (1+R2/R1) = 304. The OPA1612 op-ampfeatures an extremely low voltage noise density of1.1nV/
√Hz. R1 and R2 are thin film resistors, with the
smaller than usual 3.3Ω value of R1 minimising the Johnson(thermal) noise in the feedback path. Because the Magpickhas a source impedance of < 1Ω, Johnson noise is negligiblein the source signal itself. The proportional amplifier pro-vides an output voltage that scales with the velocity of theMagpick relative to the pickup magnet. It is suitable fordetecting high-frequency transient events such as the snapof the pick following plucking a string.
To detect slower, larger motions such as waving the Mag-pick above the magnets, a different amplifier topology isrequired. Figure 3b is an inverting leaky integrator with acorner frequency of 1/(2πC2R4) = 0.7Hz. By integratingthe incoming signal, the output provides an approximatemeasurement of the total quantity of motion of the Magpick.The ADA4522 zero-drift (chopper) op-amp is chosen for itsextremely low input offset voltage (5µV) and low 1/f noise,allowing very high gains at low frequencies without being
Figure 3: Schematics of the two preamplifiers.
Figure 4: Representation of the integrator (in blue)and proportional (in orange) signals. The threepeaks correspond to three upward plucks of a singlestring, with increasing speed of the plucking hand.
swamped by noise and drift. The low source impedance ofthe Magpick allows a small input resistor R3 to be used(6.8Ω), and the same input signal can simultaneously driveboth amplifiers.
The amplified signals (which we’ll now refer to as pick-signals) are connected to two analog inputs of a Bela em-bedded audio processing board [10], which was adopted forits extremely low latency [14]. The signal from the electricguitar (guitar-signal) itself is connected to a third input. Inthe Bela board the three signals are combined using audiocomputation (details in the following section) to generatethe signal to be sent to the guitar amplifier.
3.2 Sound DesignThe most significant features of the pick-signals are: (i)they are created only when the guitarist strums over thepickup area (as opposed to over the fretboard, for instance);(ii) they also respond to pick motion above the strings (notnecessarily touching them); and (iii) they sense the intensityof movement with a wide dynamic range.
We spent several months studying the characteristics ofthe proportional and integrator signals (Figure 4 comparesthe two signals for a specific gesture) and to combine themwith the guitar-signal to create interesting musical output.In this section we present three classes of possible combina-tions, which are schematically represented using Pure Datain Figure 5 (video examples can be found as supplementarymaterial).
3.2.1 Envelope controlThe most direct combination of the pick-signal with theguitar-signal is a simple multiplication of the two (Figure5-left). The product of the multiplication is a signal whoseamplitude is controlled by the pick-signal and whose spec-tral content is that of the guitar-signal. As a result, thesound of the guitar is unchanged except for the volume,which depends on the intensity of the pick-signal and thuson the way in which the pick is interacting with the magneticfield of the pickups. The resulting sound can be describedas a volume swell: the attack and release of the notes arealways gradual as they are in effect controlled by the Mag-pick approaching (attack) and leaving (release) the pickuparea, which is never a sudden action.
The integrator preamp was used in this case given its ca-pability to detect low-frequency gestures. In this condition,air-strumming above the strings in the pickup area resultsin a tremolo effect: the signal created in the Magpick alter-nates a high signal (when the hand moves perpendicularly tothe string, upwards or downwards) with a low signal (whenthe hand stops its movement to invert the strumming di-rection). In practical terms, this condition allows guitarists
Figure 5: Pseudocode showing the three classes ofsounds.
to control the envelope of the sound by moving the pickabove the strings after the strings are plucked. As an ex-ample, to achieve a gradual attack, a guitarist would pluckthe string(s) on the fretboard and slowly move the pluckinghand holding the Magpick over the neck pickup. Then, shecould air-strum above the strings to control the sustain.
3.2.2 Effect controlIn this condition, the output is a combination of: (i) theguitar-signal sent to the output unprocessed plus (ii) an ef-fected version of the guitar-signal with one or more param-eters controlled by the pick-signal. Figure 5-centre showsa pseudo-code for a reverb effect in which the pick-signalis used to control a parameter of a reverb like the reverbtime. The resulting effect can be compared to a reverb pedalwhose room size level is determined by the interaction of thepick with the magnetic field of the pickups (pick-signal).
For the study described in the next section, we devel-oped an audio-effect, which we named harmonised delay,that combines a typical delay with additive synthesis. Thissound is created by delaying the guitar sound and adding itsharmonic partials as identified by an FFT. To start with,the effect is triggered when the pick-signal goes above acertain threshold. Then, the intensity of the pick-signal in-fluences two effect parameters: the number of the generatedpartials and the delay interval between them.
This solution allows guitarists to control the speed ofthe arpeggios directly from the pick: the more intense thestrumming the higher the frequencies that are reached andthe shorter the delay between them (in a range from 0 to255 ms). Consequently, a high pick-signal reaches high fre-quencies and produces brighter harmonic sounds. The pro-portional preamp was used for its rapid transients. Thiseffect indeed relies on a fast peak detection of the signalamplitude to determine the resulting sonic output.
3.2.3 Playing the pickupIn the third class of combinations, the guitar-signal is sentin output unprocessed; in addition to this, the pick-signalcontrols the volume of another sound source, which mightor might not depend on the guitar-signal. For instance, inthe case shown in Figure 5-right, the pick-signal controls thevolume of a noise source. Independently of the guitar sound,which does not even need to be active, the movements ofthe Magpick over the pickup area create their own sound,giving the impression of being playing the pickups.
For our study we developed a sound design that we calledscrambled delay. The last 5 seconds of the guitar-signalare stored in a buffer. Then a portion of the recorded audiois randomly selected and played back at the original speed.
Figure 6: A close up of the wrist box, which containsthe preamp board.
The length of the selection varies each time randomly be-tween 1 and 2 seconds. A fade-in and fade-out envelope isalso added to each played-back sound to improve the homo-geneity of the output. Two of these played-back buffers areactive at the same time. The volume of the effect is con-trolled by the pick-signal using the integrator preamp. Thissound can be used as a sort of reversed delay on top of whata guitarist is playing or might even “record” a short phraseas per normal playing and then play it back, scrambled, bymoving the Magpick above the pickup area.
3.3 Physical designThe design and craft of the pick needed to take into accounttwo practical aspects. First, the pick had to be made ofdurable material, due to constant friction with steel strings.Second, it had to allow the magnet wire to be embeddedinside of it and a cable to come out of it. The shape of thepick was designed through a series of iterative prototypes.We initially used paper and clay prototypes, and we latermoved to 3D printed models. The final shape (Figure 1)resulted in a quite thick object that comines the familiaraspect of a pick with an idiosyncratic aesthetic and allowsenough space for the coil to be embedded. At the sametime, the pointy shape with a thin tip allows fast picking.The pick has a hollow cavity, covered with a cap, to allow acopper wire to be wound inside. We tested several materialsfor 3D printing or injection moulding, and the final choicewas informed by durability and grip quality, as well as byaesthetic and tactile components. In the end, we producedpicks with different combinations of the two parts (i.e. thehollow body and the cap) in acrylic, brass, and sandstone,which differed in feel and weight.
In the present implementation, the preamplifier is builton a small printed circuit board that is external to the pick,which was placed in a small 3D printed box that is strappedto the guitarist‘s wrist or hand (Figure 6). The Bela pro-cessing board was embedded in a custom-designed box withtwo surface-mounted audio sockets connected to the boardfor connecting the guitar (line in) and the amplifier (lineout). The box also hosted a third socket to connect a cus-tom made cable attached to the wrist box (Figure 7).
4. USER STUDYWe conducted a user study to investigate the potential ofthe Magpick to extend the creative possibilities of electricguitars. We recruited guitarists through email, newsletters,and social media. We sought participants of varying gender,cultural background, musical style, and skill level. We em-ployed a snowball sampling method, in which participantswere asked to recommend others. 11 participants were re-
Figure 7: The Magpick system. Bela is embeddedin the custom-design box in the centre.
cruited (8M/3F, 4 nationalities, average age 40.3). Eachwas assigned one of three sound designs: volume swell, har-monised delay, or scrambled delay.
4.1 ProtocolThe whole study lasted five days and was approved by theethics board at Queen Mary University of London and per-formers were paid £50 for their participation. On the firstday, participants came to the university to collect the Mag-pick kit; then for three successive days they tested thesystem at home and the last day they brought back thekit. During the collection day, we presented our partici-pants with the Magpick and connected it to the guitar theybrought along and to a guitar amp. We let them try outthe system for 10 minutes without giving them any infor-mation about its nature and we then explained them howit worked.
We asked participants to use the Magpick one hour aday for three consecutive days. Each morning we contactedthem with a specific task to perform with the Magpick forthat day. On day 1, we asked them to explore some creativeuses of the pick. On day 2, we asked them to prepare a shortpiece of 2 minutes or less using the Magpick and to sendover a video of them performing it1. On day 3, we askedthem to notate the piece they composed the day before. Weintended these activities to offer them some sense of purposeand to collect material for our inquiry.
The fifth day participants came back to return the kitand we performed a video-recorded exit interview. We pre-pared a set of questions that we hoped would stimulate dis-cussions about their experience with the Magpick and weasked participants to comment on the piece they recordedwhile playing back their video from day 2 (video-cued recallmethod), and to explain their notation. The interview wasconducted by one of the authors who is an electric guitarplayer; this common interest and background helped engagethe participants as peers.
4.2 AnalysisThe analysis of the data integrates the transcripts of theinterviews with the analysis of the playing techniques theyexhibited in the piece they sent over on day 2, as indepen-dently analysed by two researchers. The interpretation ofthis data evolved with several iterations of thematic analy-sis. A deductive approach was adopted: we had pre-existingcoding frames through whose lenses we aimed to read ourresearch exploration.
1A selection of these videos can be found in the supplemen-tary material.
5. FINDINGSIn this section we elaborate upon the innovative uses thatguitarists made of the Magpick with a reference to the newknowledge that is generated for the design of augmentedinstruments. Given space constraints, further discussionson the benefits and drawbacks of the Magpick from thepoint of view of human factors and performance practicewill be included in a dedicated publication.
5.1 Subtlety of interactionMost participants were impressed by the extremely sub-tle control allowed by the Magpick on the musical out-put, which can’t usually be achieved by any other means.William2 (who used the volume swell sound design), re-ported: “I just really like the fine response of it. You canget a lot more out of this in terms precision and speed. Youcan‘t get that much with a pedal”.
This subtle control is made possible by the precise sens-ing of the pick movements that is directly transformed intomusical material. Notably, our participants did not haveto undergo a long re-learning process to use the augmenta-tive potential of the Magpick. Rather, its potential of beingseamlessly integrated in typical guitar technique was evi-dent from their first encounter with the Magpick. Duringthe 10 minute explorations, some guitarists discovered atleast part of the new interaction possibilities, which usuallymanifested as a moment of epiphany visibly marked by bodylanguage indicating surprise, facial expressions, and/or ex-clamations such as: “Aha!”, “I see, I see...”. After theepiphany, three guitarists switched within seconds to mak-ing music with the newly discovered behaviours. Thomas(volume swell), for instance, less than 5 seconds after theepiphany, strummed a chord and controlled the rhythm bywaving his hand above the neck pickup.
The characteristic of being seamlessly integrated in ones’performance practice is particularly important for the dis-course around dimensionality that has been discussed in ourcommunity [24, 18, 25]. The Magpick has a relatively simplebehaviour that has a high degree of detail and immediacy.What the Magpick senses is a combination of pick position,speed, and angle but it is not easy to describe compactlyin words. Nonetheless, guitarists managed to embody thisnew technology within seconds and use its creative potentialstraightaway. This finding suggests an approach to instru-ment design and augmentation that differs from a pursuitof high-dimensional control and from attempts to create acomputational system that has an intelligent conceptual un-derstanding of what the interaction means.
5.2 Locus of augmentation = locus of interac-tion
William offered another important comment related to in-novative aspects of the Magpick: “It‘s really interesting tohave that control in your hand. You got this effect right inyour hand you can use if you want very subtle changes orlike extremely affected sounds. It’s just right there, and youcan just move the pick and it responds, as opposed to pedals.You can get a lot more out of this in terms of response asopposed to trying to get your foot kind of all over the place.It’s just really the convenience and easier adjustability justby moving your hand”. As several other participants, heparticularly enjoyed the double function of the Magpick thatworked both as a pick and as a device to control the aug-mentations/effects with. On this respect, Isla (harmoniseddelay) reflected: “I can control something at the same timeas playing when it comes off and on: that‘s the advantage”.
2We will refer to participants using pseudonyms.
The augmented aspect of the Magpick can be controlledby interacting with the hand-pick-guitar system as one nor-mally would, with minimum adaptation (e.g. pick angleand position, plucking intensity). In other words, in theMagpick the locus of augmentation coincides with the locusof interaction. The locus of interaction is on the pick, anobject that guitarists traditionally use to pluck the strings,thus they have already internalised the sensorimotor skillsto control its subtleties. By contrast, devices that guitaristsnormally use to control effects are either operated by apart of the body that guitarists have less precise control of(pedal), force guitarists to stop performing and move theirhand in a different position (knob), or require that they holda different object that completely occupies the hand and isonly dedicated to the augmentation and not to the normalinteraction (EBow).
The co-location between interaction and augmentation isa promising area of exploration. Some augmentations useaudio from the original instrument to drive feature extrac-tion and resynthesis [19, 16]. Other augmentations co-locatenew sensors on top of existing parts of the body used to playthe original instrument (e.g. TouchKeys [9] which adds po-sition sensing to the keyboard, or the control of digital ef-fects through the guitar whammy bar [5]). More commonly,the augmentation is controlled using parts of the body ordedicated movements that are typically not employed forthis purpose (e.g. manipulating potentiometers [7], but-tons or touchpads [2], proximity and pressure sensors [20]).In these cases, the musician cannot rely upon establishedsensorimotor skills and has to undergo a process of refamil-iarisation, which is a deterrent to instrument uptake [13].
Coincident loci of interaction and augmentation also of-fer guitarists visual and proprioceptive information on theintensity of the effect. Isla explained that when she wantedto increase the level of the effect she would just move closerto one of the pickups, where the pick-signal is higher.
5.3 Effect ready to handWhen using the Magpick, guitarists do not have to decidewhen to activate and deactivate the effect, which is ratheralways ready to hand. Two participants noted that theintensity of the effect can be gradually controlled in all in-termediate levels by means of strumming position and in-tensity. With traditional pedals this can be achieved onlywith an expression pedal or by adjusting the knob on thepedal, both options causing disruptions on the performance.
Having the effect ready to hand lent the augmented as-pect of the Magpick to be meaningfully used even for a fewinstants, too. With this respect, William reported: “With apedal I think it’s more like: Ok, I’m going to put this pedalon and use it for a while. This (the Magpick) lends itself toshort changes in it”. The analysis of the videos of guitarists’pieces gave support to this idea: five of them clearly usedthe augmentative potential of the Magpick just for a fewseconds to embellish the piece. James (playing the pickup)discussed: “I used it to trigger the effect at the end of somephrases. I played three chords and then I wanted to trig-ger this effect to create an atmospheric thingy after the lastchord. Then I went back back to a dry effect to triggered theeffect again after three chords. I liked activating the effectat the tail of what I was doing and being dry in the mid-dle”. Isla had a similar use of the Magpick. In her piece shemostly kept her plucking hand in between the pickups (noeffect) and moved it on top of the bridge pickup (maximumeffect) only at the end of the phrase to “lift up the piece”.
Having a continuous control on the sound directly on theplucking hand allowed participants using the volume swellcondition to have continuous control over the sustain of the
guitar. This would be normally achieved by operating anexpression pedal, which cannot be used for fast and subtlechanges. With our technology, the envelope of the soundcan be controlled by air-plucking the Magpick on top ofthe strings after a string is plucked. This property wasparticularly appreciated by all the participants that hadthe Magpick set with this sound design. Thomas comparedthe feature of controlling the sustain of the note to bowingthe violin: “You have the kind of control, like bow playing.You can keep the note and change the shape of the sound.This is really important”.
6. CONCLUSIONWe presented a new technology for electric guitars that em-beds our own aesthetic and values, which are shared byother designers of new DMIs [13], centered on exploring nu-ances in music performance. In comparison to guitar andpick augmentations that trigger events or add multiple di-mensions of control, the Magpick explores the subtleties of asingle signal source within the pick through high-bandwidthsensing. The signal behaviour contains a certain amountof redundancy, whereby varying combinations of proximity,angle, speed, and quantity of motion produce similar instan-taneous outputs. This redundancy ultimately helps enablea wide variety of distinctive performance techniques thatmight have different trajectories over time or interact withtraditional technique in different ways. That the locus ofaugmentation corresponds to the traditional locus of actua-tion (i.e. the plucking hand) forces an integration of gestu-ral language between traditional and extended techniques,while the sound design that modifies the guitar signal andmaintains the status of the augmented guitar as a singleinstrument rather than the first step toward a ‘theme parkone-man band’ [18].
As we developed the Magpick as a research explorationsthere are several technical improvements that are possible,some of which have been mentioned by the participants ofour study. In particular, the pick could be made wireless,embedding the preamplifier circuitry along with a battery(or even remote RF power), with a wireless transmittersending the Magpick-signal to an external sound processingdevice. The Magpick-signal could also be provided directlyto the performer as a control signal for other effects or in-struments, such as through CV (control voltage) control formodular synths, or through a user-programmable board.
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThis work was funded by EPSRC under grant EP/N005112/1.
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