The idea of new musical instruments is an interesting way to wiggle beyond
my premise, you may have a point! However, enough varieties have already
been invented world wide throughout human history to possibly only end up
with varieties of redundancy at this point. Partch's invented instruments
sound more like odd variations on established sounds than any utterly new
KIND of sound. Same for the recent Elypse releases of home made instrument
CDs. (Excellent stuff though!) We've had a hell of a long time to try out
acoustic devices of many, many kinds and types and have certainly done so.
I bet most of us don't even know about many musical instruments that have
long existed.
The electronic creation of "fantastic" instruments perhaps offers more hope
for new sonic elements, yet who was it that already strung a single wire
out for a vast distance and vibrated it for tones? Most possible variations
of the electronically constructed "fantastic" may also have actually been
tried with much more effort in physical reality, (artists are notorious for
going to ANY length to be new!) or enough so that no significantly
discernable difference from other already known sounds will occur. All I
can say is possibly, possibly, but I haven't heard it happen yet...
DJ
Negativland
>On Mon, 12 Mar 2001, Don Joyce wrote:
>
>> I completely agree.
>> But just to toot my own style, I think the future of all music, including
>> the avant guard, in some very real sense could be said to be entirely about
>> collaging the past - our now completed range of possible precedents.
>> Creating no new ones but discovering what energies exist BETWEEN them when
>> recombined or remanipulated in new and untried ways.
>
>I've been following this discussion with much interest, but I'm not
>convinced. Maybe the guitar is a "dead-end" from your perspective in
>terms of innovation, since its tonal characteristics and technical
>approaches to the instrument are well understood -- I'll grant that.
>
>But why assume that we're done inventing musical instruments? I'd suggest
>that we might be on the brink of a whole new class of them. To simplify,
>virtually all 'traditional' instruments involve striking something that
>resonates, and/or inducing vibration in an cavity of air, right? Early
>synthesizers were unable to reproduce anything like the complexity of the
>interactions of acoustic instruments, so the sounds they produced were
>blatantly artifical, with limited harmonic complexity.
>Modern synthesizers, with more sophisticated algorithms, can do a lot
>better at recreating 'natural' sounds. But why stop there? Synthesizers
>could model instruments that don't (or even can't) exist physically --
>strings with combinations of lengths and thicknesses that aren't
>practical; resonant cavities with shapes too difficult to manufacture, or
>any number of different approaches to creating sound.
>
>I think things like the Harry Partch instruments offer a fair bit of
>evidence that new instruments could offer as much tonal color and
>variation as, say, a cello, or an oboe, or a piano.
>
>Or would new breeds of instruments still not count as new precendents?
>
>-- d.
>
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>
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