Australian composer Chris Vik performed a piece written for the Melbourne Town Hall organ. Vik has been experimenting with the Kinect device to provide gestural control for digital musical instruments, so he was excited to learn that the Sidney organ had been converted to MIDI control back in the 1990s. Too much fun.

William Weir writes in The Atlantic about the Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology (previously highlighted on Mewzik), focusing on how experimental musical instruments don’t often find their way into the mainstream.

tromba marina

Stroh Violin

This is true, but I think it’s always been true. Instruments come and go. The tromba marina was fairly popular for a couple hundred years, if extant examples in musical instrument collections are any indication. But who today has ever even heard

Chapman Stick

of the thing? Before Amati and the Cremonese school more or less standardized what we now think of as a violin, there were lots of variations on the theme — some unique, some

baryton

actually semi-popular for a time. The baryton was a favorite of Haydn’s patron prince Nikolaus Esterházy, so there are 120 trios by Haydn for this now obsolete instrument. Some instruments like the Stroh violin were developed to take advantage of technologies –in that case the early acoustical recording process that valued an instrument’s ability to project over its tonal depth. When electronic recording arrived, the Stroh became obsolete.

In modern times we see many innovative new instruments, and it’s not clear how many will have a sustained life. The Chapman Stick has been around since around 1974, and while it is not even as popular as accordions or tubas  (perhaps due to its $2100 base price), it’s still in production and continues to be fairly widely used. Other “fad” instruments abound, like the Hang drum  and its imitators, spurred by viral marketing and an apparently intuitive playing technique.

Hang

Weir rightly discusses the impact of audio synthesis, essentially divorcing the sound from the controller. Many of the latest innovations in musical instrument design are focused on the user interface, attempting to make it more intuitive and functional. And in some cases, attempting also to restore the haptic responsiveness of an acoustical device.

Who knew Georgia Tech was a hotbed of musical instrument innovation? Well, apparently a lot of people knew, but I sure didn’t. They actually have a Center for Music Technology and next month they are presenting the 2012 Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition. Check out the Resistor JelTone, a “partially edible toy piano” by Brooklyn-based hacker collective, NYC Resistor, or the Audio Skin, incorporating on-body textiles in a sculptural and performative musical instrument, by Vienna, Austria-based Martin Rille.

Resistor-JelTone

Musical instruments are brilliantly complex devices that, from an engineering perspective, are a tremendous challenge to combine ergonomics, sound, and aesthetic nuance. An instrument must not only produce a desirable sound, it must interface with the human body in such a way that the function is sufficiently intuitive as to become an aid rather than a hindrance to music making.  Having an instrument that is also delicious is simply a bonus.

There have been numerous attempts over the years to create an entirely digital guitar interface. By which I mean a digital interface in the shape of a guitar. The YourRock guitar is a recent addition to the list and is a little more earnest than most. While it’s still not much more than a toy, I can see how it has possibilities for new expressive music making. As long as you realize it’s not a guitar, but an interface. The main difference from a player’s perspective is nuance. You can use the whammy bar to add expression to the notes, but most real musicians understand the importance of the left hand in bending notes and adding vibrato, etc. Despite its frets, a guitar is not a discreet-pitch instrument. The most attractive feature of this device is likely the tap playing capability. For those who want to try experimenting with this  technique, a machine like this could well be a useful controller.

I always look for what they don’t tell you in a promo ad or video. Obviously they want to highlight only the instrument’s best and coolest features. On almost none of the video promos did anyone play polyphonic music. There were a few chords strummed at the beginning of one, so I know it has polyphonic capability. But they don’t promote that at all, which makes me wonder why.