Patch for guitar

Now that it’s easy to get multiple channels of sound into and out of a computer with pretty low throughput latency (thanks partly to the well-designed linux operating system), an obvious and attractive application is signal-processing an electric guitar separately string by string. This permits a wide variety of non-linear processes which, if properly designed, preserve the periodicity of the individual string while making possible a wide variety of new sounds. Pitchsynchronous algorithms also become available. It is also possible to separate the effect of amplitude change from that of changing harmonics, thus preserving the playability of the instrument. 1. INTRODUCTORY POLEMIC Although computer music overall has seen great advances in the past fifty years, in one area, using computers in live instrumental music performance, our understanding is still crude. The main advances in live computer music performance have largely consisted of building an infrastructure, so that now a musician can combine a computer, audio and control hardware, and software (Pd being one possibility) to make a live interactive computer music application. But visits to a club or concert hall reveal that the computer is mostly used as a recording and/or sequencing device, rather than as a musical instrument. The main payoff of computing in music performance has been to reduce and replace the role of musicianship. If playing a musical instrument and/or singing were pure drudgery this would be all to the good, but it seems likely that much of musical knowledge is built up through the physical act of making music in time. Musical cultures, at least up to now, have been at least partly maintained in a performance tradition, and even composers (all but the most theoretically inclined) rely on the sort of musicianship that is learned and transmitted through music making. And even though there is clearly much music to be made using studio techniques and/or sequencers, there is also much to be made Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Pd07, Montreal, Quebec, Canada Copyright 2007 Copyright remains with the author(s). instrumentally. The computer is very handy for the former, but is still only with difficulty applied to the latter.