What makes something a musical instrument?
I’ve been thinking about this question since my final year as an undergraduate, and explored it in some detail in my M.Phil. thesis. I’ve also blogged about the subject, and discussed it many times. I’m now approaching a kind of opaque definition:
“If we take two performances of a piece, played on the same instrument, with identical articulation, and subtract one performance from the other, we’re left with the instrument”
In other words, to be called a musical instrument something must be capable of nuance.
Mechanical and analogue electronic instruments, are broadly predictable in their behaviour, but at a detailed level they constantly produce small, unpredictable variations in tone and response even with the same playing techniques.
With digital instruments, this capability for nuance and unpredictability isn’t inherent and therefore needs to be added artificially. For me, providing these nuances of interaction remains one of the key challenges of digital instrument design.
*Image by Soophoo from Wikimedia commons
