A Finnish turn: Digital and synthesiser musical instruments

Abstract

This paper will follow a musically experimental trajectory from non-mediated musical sound through many centuries of musical innovation from the simplest forms of resonation to today’s synthesised musics in electronic – digital and synthesiser musics – with side looks at how changes in musical technologies play roles in the player-instrument and listener-music relations. I shall then look briefly at the modern, electric amplification of ‘electric’ instruments and much ‘louder’ musics with their equally radical changes in audience-performance situations. Finally, then, I will turn to electronic variants, which yet again drastically change the musical gestalt of player-instrument and listener-music relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Postphenomonology
• synthesisers
• digital musical instruments
• non-human music
• animal musics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This hit me since I saw this thrust as one of many contemporary forms of technological trajectories clearly facing postphenomenology, my particular style of philosophy of technology analysis.

2 I only recently learned that John Van Neumann advised MIT colleagues to only give positive or utopian projections for future technologies.

3 Before Present, science dating.

4 Linda and I are privileged to hear chamber music with exactly such Stradivarius and Guarneri instruments, feet away from our seating, summers in Vermont at the Miller estate as Manchester Music Festival Patrons; in the fall it shifts to Carnegie Hall, very large, for philharmonics and piano virtuosos. Both carry-overs from Renaissance praxes, but filled in by many other styles of music as well.

5 4/S is the largest interdisciplinary STS (Science-Technology Studies organization having an annual conference. The three of us formed a panel that year. Obviously, it was unusual to have a high school student as participant.)

6 I note that only since instruments, invented since the discovery of the EMS, have we had the means to experience the sounds and other sensory dimensions produced by insects and animals, in short since the twentieth century.

7 This is my own comment.