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What's the history of musical instruments? How have developments in musical instrument tech changed music itself? What are some cutting-edge instruments out now?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, say, who's
that playing the guitar. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Vokeman,

(00:22):
and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we were going to
talk about the future of music, specifically when it comes
to musical performance, and kind of talk all about how
how sometimes the instruments that we have at our disposal
can actually shape the way we create music, and the
sound of the music can actually create entire revolutions in music.

(00:45):
I got an interesting trivia question for y'all. All right,
what's older music or farming. I'm gonna go with music music. Yeah, yeah,
because agriculture. I mean, I sit there and think about that. Like,
I'm sure when we were hunters and gathers were still
bashing a little ewoks skulls to make the music because
we had walks before we had it was a long

(01:07):
time ago, Lauren, but it wasn't in a galaxy far
okay anyway, So yep, numb. So that's for the old
school fans who like the pre uh messed with version
of the original trilogy. Well, yeah, actually, uh so the
even the e Walks had music, and they were a
fairly primitive society. Yeah that they didn't have a lot

(01:28):
of advanced technology, but they still had a fairly robust
music scene. Is it fair to I honestly don't know
the answer to this, and maybe you you do, Joe,
because you were looking into some of the earliest musical instruments, right, Uh,
is it fair to say that some of the earliest
musical instruments were percussion instruments? Well, they could be. Uh

(01:49):
if we're part of the problem is we just don't
know how old because so few things survived. We know, Um,
we know music is older than say, agriculture, because we
have a pretty good idea that agriculture began about ten
to twelve thousand years ago, and when the rolling stones
are older than that. We have musical instruments that are

(02:10):
we now believe about forty years old. Yeah, not percussion instruments,
but the percussion may have preceded them because obviously, what
were the first musical instruments, Well, they were our bodies,
right before people were building things with their bodies and
were building you know, making tools. Yeah, they were. They

(02:31):
could clap and they could sing. And there's actually some
really interesting research about why singing started. Yeah, well, I
mean think about it. Why did we start making music
instead of just comun talking or grunting or etcetera. Gesticulating. Yeah,
One interesting theory is that music performance started um as

(02:54):
sort of an organizing principle for tribes of apex predators.
So it was staying Yeah, and so you listen to
the way wolves howl, Well, wolves howl for lots of reasons.
We think some of the main reasons they do it
are to establish like a a social dominance hierarchy, to

(03:15):
establish the borders of their territory, and to sort of
create a defense alertness network within their territory UM and
to sort of coordinate during hunt's interest. And those are
all characteristics that would be displayed by predators, actually predators,
which are the same kind of role that early hominids

(03:36):
would have played, like Neanderthals and our direct dominid ancestors um.
And so there's a pretty good there's a pretty good
basis there for thinking, wow, well, maybe our ancestors had
organized systems of vocal calls the same way that wolves
have howling systems, but obviously we have um more versatile

(03:59):
vocal cords than wolves do, and so we have even
more ability to you know, maybe we could kind of
create an even more intricate and and well thought out
system of vocal signals, and from there you have the
idea that well, maybe that's how the first songs came about.
And of course, I mean, this whole topic ties in

(04:22):
very closely with the one we looked at earlier, the
storytelling topic and the idea of how music has become
part of our way of sharing stories and h and
culture to a point where you know, you could imagine
a lore teller someone who is in charge of gathering
information about the people and passing that on also communicating

(04:45):
that in the form of song, which can make things
easier to remember and can also have a very very
deep emotional impact, as anyone who enjoys music can tell you.
I mean, I know there are people out there who
just don't get music. It's just doesn't speak to them
in any way. But for others, like I include myself
in this, certain types of music can get a huge

(05:08):
emotional response from me. Kenny g makes me really angry,
it's it's obviously not my favorite form of artistic expression.
It's harder for me to consume it than other forms
of art, so I I tend to consume less music
than other things. But it, but it definitely has a
huge um I think a mnemonic impression on our brains.

(05:29):
That the patterns and the mathematics and it are something
that the bits of your brain that you're not using
to listen to the words of a story you are
going to kick in well. And it's hard to deny
that it's deeply social's singing together with people really helps.
It creates a sense of oneness and harmony, a kind
of you know, a spiritual bond. I've even seen each

(05:52):
other some recent some recent scientific studies that have suggested
that singing with a group of people can help improve
your mood drastically, Like it can be a true psychological
aid for for people who are suffering from a depression
or they're just they have anxiety issues. Um, assuming that
you don't have an anxiety issue with singing with a group.

(06:13):
But but but it is it's more like kind of
choral singing. It's not that it's not like you know
you're gonna get singled out to do a crazy Yeah,
so all of that obviously speculation. I mean, there's just
there's no physical evidence for that. It's just we we
can look at how other animals behave and we can
sort of guess how things like that came about, but

(06:34):
there's no way to really know. What we do know UM,
and that can be tested by radiocarbon dating and stuff.
Is that at the at the very latest thirty five
thousand years ago, and some new tests reveal probably more
like forty to forty two or forty three thousand years ago.
We had bone flutes um found in caves in Germany.

(06:56):
There are these uh flutes made from the birds of
bones and and they're just little hollow bird bones, but
they've they've clearly been carved, so they're carved holes along
the length of the flute um where you would place
your fingers to cover them up and create notes. And
researchers who found these have created wooden replicas that they

(07:19):
say are are pretty solid, like you can play them
and create some pleasing harmonic frequency. So the other thing
we wanted to talk about before we get into some
of the crazy instruments that we've seen UH that are
are trying to either reshape music or just create new
ways of playing music. We wanted to talk a little

(07:40):
bit about some of the instruments that were really familiar
with today that had uh through their creation and and
people playing them, have really transformed music in big ways. Now,
there are way too many to name. I mean, obviously
if we were to go and and even if we
were to just focus on just the the Western Hemist
fear musical traditions, because obviously music is very different in

(08:04):
different parts of the world. We all have different rules
for the way we make music, We have different instruments
that we play, there are different techniques, but there are
certain ones in the Western traditions that have had an
enormous impact, particularly on modern music, the music that we
listened to today. Um. You know, clearly we could talk
about even the invention of just the guitar itself, and

(08:25):
not the electric guitar, but just the guitar, which came
in pretty late in the Renaissance. But I think the
one we really wanted to start with it was a
different musical instrument, one that is featured still quite heavily
in music today, the piano, right right, Yeah, Um, well,
stringed instruments appear in basically every culture across the globe.
Everyone has versions of these, But the piano itself was

(08:48):
not invented until about seventeen hundred, or maybe innovated as
a better word, because before the piano, we had the
harpsichord and the clavichord, and these were two, um, two
stringed instruments, the clavichord being a having these bi chord
strings that were struck by tangents at the end of
the keys that you would press down. Um, just a
really simple lever motion. Um. It allowed for dynamic expression

(09:11):
the way that we get in a in a modern piano.
But it was very quiet, but beyond about you know,
the length of a room, a good few feet beyond
the actual instrument, you couldn't hear it very well. So
it wasn't a concert piece at all. UM, And the
harps harpsichord was a little bit louder Um. That's a
that's a set of strings that are plucked by quills

(09:31):
moved by jack's when you press the keys. So it's
an extra layer added on to that basic lever motion.
But uh, it was it wasn't as dynamic. It was
a pretty um uh steady level of sound. You can
get the emotion that you can that people talk about
getting from piano out of a harpsichord, right like with
a piano where you can you can press the different

(09:52):
pedals to to allow a string to be somewhat muffled
or make it louder with a With a harpsichord, you
you push a key, and that sound that you get
as the same sound you're going to get no matter
how you push that key right exactly. And you know,
but beyond the pedals, what's really innovative about the piano
is that um, you can you can press a key
at a different um, different hardness or softness, and get

(10:14):
a different sound out of that string. Um. And and
those innovations were all due to um. Bartolomeo Cristoforio maybe
that might be how you say it, who worked for
the Royal court. He was Italian, an Italian craftsman of harpsichords.
He worked for the Royal Court of Italy at the time,
repairing their their machines, music machines. And yeah, he created

(10:35):
a whole bunch of innovations that a lot of them
were so complicated that they didn't actually come into common
use until a century later because they were so expensive
to to create. I mean really really interesting things like
a like an escapement mechanism that let the hammer fall
away from the string instantly after the hit, so that, um,
you know, it would it would let the string vibrate freely,

(10:55):
or a stopper to prevent the hammer from coming back
and hitting the key, all kinds of all kinds of
stuff that that sounds really simple when you say it
out loud like that, but it was was really completely
revolutionary for the instrument. And at first they were so
so individual and expensive to make that they really were
only used by royalty and extremely famous concert players. But

(11:20):
but innovations eventually let them be smaller, added more keys,
added greater expressions of sound, and um, they wound up
being in basically every affluent home and eventually every home period,
allowing people to learn how to play music on a
very you know, the keys are laid out in this
very obvious way on like a guitar where you have

(11:40):
to kind of play with the frets and figure out
how to how to do these complex hand motions. You
can just look at a keyboard and see where your
sounds are going to be coming from. Oh yeah, there's
a very obvious visual correspondence between the keys and the
musical scale itself. Sure, sure, although of course you can
play with such great complexity that for some of us

(12:01):
that obviousness is obvious skated by the deft fingers of
a talented pianist. Well, it is interesting just to think
about everything that the piano allows you to do. I mean,
it's sort of the one stop shop for the single composer.
You know, you can use a piano to compose much
more complex pieces of music. Sure, sure, yeah, you can.

(12:24):
You can hold a note with a single key the
way that you can't on a lot of on on
a lot of the predecessors. And um and yeah, and
and dynamic is the word that people always apply to
it in this kind of literature. And it's it's fascinating that,
um yeah, I mean, you know, so solo piano concerts
didn't happen until like the eighteen hundreds, and and it's
such a such a major part of musical existence these days.

(12:47):
But you know, it's it's they couldn't be incorporated into
concerts until Christopheros. Um. Yeah, the fourte piano or piano forte,
which of course means uh. Well, if it's fo four
to forte, piano means loud soft and pianoforte means soft loud,
meaning that this instrument was capable of of producing both

(13:08):
types of sound, either the very soft, subtle sounds or
it could be quite loud and dramatic. But the interesting
thing to look at here is not just how this is. Well,
it's a cool instrument. It makes a new sound. It
actually changed music. Sure, it changed the whole music scene,
and it changed what people would do and the kinds
of songs they would write. Yes, yes, And it eventually,

(13:30):
like you were saying, Lauren, I mean, the fact that
pianos became more affordable ad meant that it was a
more accessible instrument for a larger potential audience. So you
started seeing pianos being that that sort of became the
entrigue musical instrument for a lot of people. Now Ever,
since most since a lot of households had them, um
and since especially women were expected to know how to

(13:53):
play to entertain their families, but we're not expected to
appear on stage. In fact, it women were banned from
the stage for playing pianos for a long time, ragtime
and jazz. In fact, we're partially originated on pianos due
to due to different different ways of playing uh using
the instrument to play right, I was going to pick
up with another musical instrument that truly revolutionized music, although

(14:15):
uh when it was being worked on it was being
during the invention of it, that wasn't necessarily the intent.
That's the electric guitar. Now, the electric guitar, the first
one really that we can point to, was designed by
Lloyd lore in N who was an engineer with Gibson
Guitar Company, and he had created was called an electric pickup. Now,

(14:37):
this pickup is essentially it's an electro magnet that is
part of the guitar and um and it's hooked up
to a pre amplifier. And what happens is when the
string vibrates, it creates a fluctuation in the magnetic field.
That fluctuation in the magnetic field induces a current through
the pickup, which then goes to the pre amp where
it can amplify this tiny electrical current and turn into

(15:01):
something that that can then be sent on to other
equipment like speakers, so that you can actually have a
much louder sound come from a guitar, because one of
the problems was that trying to play something like a guitar,
which does not make like acoustic guitar, does not make
a very loud sound in the grand scheme of things,

(15:22):
if you want to play for a really large group,
it's very difficult to do. If you're incorporating it into
a larger orchestra or exactly. Uh, you could put a
microphone directly in front of the the the instrument, but
that usually meant that you had some distortion of what
the sound was like, and you wouldn't get a true
representation of what a guitar sounded like. You would get

(15:43):
some something that would be musical, but you would have
some artifacts in that a little bit. Yeah, there's more
for feedback also, that's also true. Yeah, So so doing
this was kind of getting around that, and in fact,
for the longest time, electric guitars were really just meant
to be a representation of what an acoustic guitar sounds like,
just louder. Now, I've seen a lot of arguing about

(16:05):
when the actual first what we should call an electric
guitar was put together. So there's some people say that
It wasn't really until the Rickenbacker frying Pan uh and
other people would say that the other models around nineteen thirties, say,
late twenties, early thirties. Yeah, there was a Hawaiian guitar

(16:26):
that was played. It was like a lap guitar you
played in your lap and it had that sort of
kind of twanky sound that you would associate with Hawaiian music.
That was one of the earliest electric guitars. But I mean,
it's is one of those things where it all depends
upon whose definition you you, uh, you pay attention to
when you're talking about the modern electric guitars. Something that

(16:47):
really shaped the music in a in an interesting way.
You gotta get all the way into really the nineteen fifties.
That's where you start seeing the electric guitars that really
had a big impact. And that's where you see the
guitars from uh Leo Fender. You know, he created the
first mass produced solid body electric guitar in nineteen fifty
and then you had less Paul. Of course, everybody thinks

(17:07):
he invented the electric guitar. Now he certainly, he certainly
had played a huge part in and of course he
built his own electric guitar called the log that looked
like just a big solid piece of wood that fit
into another body. So that but he was it was
sort of a his own little hobby, but it was
never meant to be sold as an actual guitar. UM

(17:28):
but his models started hitting the market in nineteen fifty two,
and uh, this was when you started seeing musicians play
with the fact that they could create different sounds with
an electric guitar by messing with different settings and creating
distortion and echo effects, this sort of thing where they
weren't trying to accurately recreate the sound of an acoustic guitar.

(17:51):
They were trying to make new sounds. And there was
a little bit of um, not a little bit, there was.
There was quite a bit of resistance in some in
some genres of music when the electric guitar became prominent,
So rhythm and blues and rock and roll, obviously they
they adopted the electric guitar pretty quickly. Other genres were slower.

(18:11):
In fact, when Bob Dylan showed up with electric guitar,
that was that was a controversy in the folk music world.
I can't believe you've betrayed us. Country music also, I
mean there was there were certain types of country music
that that adopted it quickly, but um, these these were
instruments that eventually became the backbone of a lot of
popular music today. Obviously, not every genre of music relies

(18:35):
heavily on on electric guitars, but a lot of it does.
If you listen to your typical radio station in America,
for example, you're gonna get a lot of electric guitar. Well,
it's not as uh as central in every genre as
it is in in say, your standard rock and roll band,
but you'll find it featured even as a background or
textual instrument in tons of music. Sure, yeah, most. And

(19:00):
that also brings us to another musical instrument that has
become pretty heavily featured in a lot of music, the synthesizer.
And this sort of ties into where we're going to
be going with this in the future. But I want
to talk about first the one of the earliest h
This is not truly a synthesizer in in the respect

(19:20):
that it was never called that, but it was a
musical instrument that I had to talk about, the tell harmonium,
also known as the dynamo phone, dynamo phone Dynamo phone.
It was the saxomaphone and the Dynamo phone. It was
invented by Thaddeus Hill or K. Hill. And uh, it

(19:41):
was a steam powered synthesizer with it had steam powered steamer,
a steamer you might want to steam powered instrument. It
had electromagnetic generators, and it had a It had velocity
sensitive key is like a piano, meaning that if you

(20:01):
played the keys gently, it would make a softer sounds.
So this is something that tries to kill you in BioShock.
It could create different sounds simultaneously, so you could actually
have it make different quality sounds. And uh, and it
weighed a mirror two hundred tons. Two hundred tons steam
powered synthesizer. I want this what I could play heart

(20:26):
and soul on that for defeating your enemies and driving
them before you. You don't even have the missical ax
in your hand. So now the first synthesizer that was
actually called a synthesizer was made by Harry f Olsen
and Herbert Blair for our c A in nineteen sixty three.

(20:46):
Are a quote unquote Bob Moag, Thank you Noel for
the correction, Thank you Joe for letting me let Noel
know that he was thanked for the correction. UH created
a voltage controlled oscillator and amplifier module with a keyboard.
Would we now call the move synthesizer, despite the fact
that his last name apparently was pronounced Mog. So here's
the cool thing is that Noel's actually gathered a little

(21:07):
bit of a Moog synthesizer. So you can hear what
it sounds like, a SUSI hear it. You're going to
recognize that sound. I guarantee it, alright. So, and of
course synthesizers became another one of those things that that
went beyond what the intent was. The intent originally was

(21:27):
to try and create a musical instrument that could recreate
certain sounds, that could synthesize the sounds of other instruments
and do it in a way where you could, you know,
have have at your your disposal and entire orchestra, even
if you just had one instrument. However, they the sounds
of synthesizers were pretty distinct, or another way of saying

(21:48):
that is, they didn't sound anything like the actual instruments
they were trying to to emulate at that time. In fact,
they were kind of hilarious. It certainly was. I mean,
those early synthesizers were hilarious. If you wanted to listen to, like,
this is what a piano sounds like. It doesn't sound
anything like any piano you've ever actually, yeah, or or

(22:10):
banjo or whatever. It just be this weird kind of
electronic sound that sounds almost but not quite exactly, not
like what it was supposed to sound like. But the
cool things that musicians found ways of making music with
this where that was that was the the draw of
the music. It wasn't that they were trying to make
the synthesizer be some other musical instrument. They were using

(22:31):
the synthesizer for what it was, right. They realized that
it had its own unique sound that that could be
incorporated into questionably pleasing music. I'm not gonna go with
questionably pleasing you, or you get to go sit in
the corner of shame. Because new wave new wave music
I'm I'm I'm mostly I'm mostly the roots that our
theme we new wave music. That I loved the new

(22:53):
wave era. So we're talking about the early eighties when
we had all this music here in the United States.
We had all this music come over from the UK,
where it was a lot of bands experimenting with different
sounds and different instruments, including synthesizers. There were a lot
of sythen I'm giving it crap, but I would give
any genre crap. I think that, I think that any

(23:14):
genre is technically m questionably pleasing. Well, oh, I mean again,
it's hard to imagine the music scene today without computer
generated tones. Sure, I mean that that come a long way.
And early synthesizers weren't computer generated tones, sorry, electronically generated.
I mean now we have I guess you'd say digitally generated. Sure, sure,

(23:37):
Sure that that day that auto tuning became a thing
that people did on purpose, as opposed to something to
correct the occasional sharp or flat note, suddenly became a style.
The whole purpose of auto tuning was for it to
be unobtrusive, that you wouldn't notice that it was happening.
And then you started to get artists who again took
this tool that wasn't meant to take center stage and

(24:00):
turn it around. I remember I did a podcast about
the auto tuning software and the creator was sort of
amused that it had become this this tool for people
to make songs. That's really they're using it for the
opposite reason for why I made it, by the way
that guy now makes and did at the time, makes

(24:21):
software to help oil companies find oil under the ground
through sound. It's true, that's terrific. That is interesting how
like a tool designed as a recording tool became a
weapon of performance, to be fair. To be fair, he
was working on that first and then came up with
the auto tune idea. So it's it's sort of but
but they were related. So that's interesting that, like, we

(24:44):
found oil and we were able to make this guy
sing okay. So we know that new music is brought
about by new instruments. When you've got something different in
your hands that makes a different sound, that's played in
a different way, it creates news genres. And that's why
it's hard to predict what the music of the future

(25:04):
is going to sound like, because you don't know what
people are going to be using to create it necessarily
right now. I think one thing we can definitely predict
is that a lot of the music performance in the
future is going to be electronic. It's going to be digital.
A lot of people will be you know, they're performing
their music with a laptop. But that aside, what are
the kinds of instruments that we think might be coming

(25:27):
about to change the way we produce music in the future. Well, sure,
I mean, we've got lots of people musicians, engineers, scientists,
mad scientists, all coming up with different ways to create music.
And we've all sort of gone out and kind of
looked up some different musical instruments that are kind of,
you know, they're on the cutting edge, or some of

(25:48):
them are a little you know, quirky or more like
performance art based type stuff. But we wanted to talk
a little bit about some of the kind of creative
approaches to creating music. I've got I've got one right
here called the art of Phone. Have you guys heard
of this? Okay, So the art a phone kind of
looks a little bit like a guitar. It does have
it's got a neck with with sort of fretwork, but

(26:10):
it's all digital threats and you actually plug an iPhone
into this this device, and the iPhone has an app
that works with this particular device. So you plug the
iPhone in and that's what allows you do select different songs,
different sounds, different things like the percussion. You can create

(26:31):
loops so you can play something, loop it and then
add in a drum track and loop that and add
in another track. You can play it like it's an
upright basse. You can play it like it's a violin. Uh.
And it actually has a little digital touch area where
that acts like the strings. You move your fingers against that,
and that's what allows you to play this thing. And um,

(26:52):
you know, we're going to create a blog post. We're
going to include links to these different devices so that
you can actually listen to what they sound like. I
listened to this one on a video on YouTube, and
it was pretty impressed with what it could do. I mean,
considering that this is using a smartphone as the real
brains of the device itself, it was really kind of

(27:16):
remarkable and that you could even with this thing, create
music files in different formats and export it directly from
the instruments. So you have a if you wanted to
compose something, you could do your percussion track, your bass track,
your main track, recorded all on this one device and
export and you've got a song. Pretty neat. Yeah, My

(27:38):
and my my favorite thing about about this incredible future
of of technology that we're currently experiencing. Is that really
with with things like capaciti of touch, anything can become
an instrument. My a few months back, my very favorite
Raspberry Pie application of the day, because I have a
new one about about every day, UM, was something called
a beat box. This is a b e et box

(27:59):
because because it's a wooden box with an audio amplifier,
UM and root vegetables placed in the top and uh
and and with the circuitry from the Raspberry Pie, you
touch the beat and it and it creates a percussive sounds,
so it registers your touch and that becomes that's insane,

(28:20):
so you can actually play vegetables. Joe, do you want
to take a swing at one of these? Well? Uh, First,
I guess I want to talk about how one type
of thing that I definitely see happening is this sort
of acoustic electric mash up okay type of instrument that
we see a lot of. Um. We can talk in
a minute about this, uh this awesome music instrument design

(28:43):
festival that they have Georgia competition around here, but a
couple of the coolest enturies, like one example is this
thing uh called the elect trumpet, which is. Uh, it's
an acoustic electric mash up. So it's a it's a
traditional acoustic trumpet that you play like a normal trumpet,
except in addition to the traditional controllers that control airflow

(29:06):
and stuff like that, it also has digital controllers so
you you hook like I think. It also has an
iPhone as the main controller of interesting. Yeah, and so
it's got multiple types of buttons, so while you're playing
the trumpet like you would normally play a trumpet, you
can also manipulate digital controllers on it to create all
kinds of you know, weird effects, manipulate and modulate the

(29:30):
sound you're creating. Um. Another one is this is really cool? Uh.
Keith McMillan Instruments produced this thing called the Cabo Violence. Yeah.
I watched the video that you sent out with this.
That was really I mean, it was very alien sounding
to me because it doesn't sound like anything else you've

(29:51):
listened to. Necessary So what is what is this thing?
I didn't I didn't actually have time to check it out. Well,
it's it's a so it's a violin bow um. Actually
it can go with ultimple instruments. Is violin, viola, cello
and bass um but so it's a stringed instrument bow. Essentially,
what I think he's trying to do with it is
to um capture both the original sort of full range

(30:16):
of dynamic expression and emotion that you can get with
a stringed instrument, which is really hard to capture in
like Middi's say, electronic music. To get all of that
depth of expression and the different subtleties of that sound
with digital control at the same time. So this is
a bluetooth enabled bow UM that connects wirelessly with a

(30:39):
piece of software on your computer so that while you play,
you're getting all the let's see here it's got on
the press release, so it's got um. It's since his
motion on the X Y and z axes, grip pressure,
hair tension, tilt, angle, and the position of the bow
relative to the instrument, and like all of what you

(30:59):
had dinner, but all of the but like a stringed
instrument player will tell you all those different things, uh
go into creating the very complex texture of sound that
you create with a string. Sure, it's how the bow
is interacting with the tension of the string and therefore
creating a library of sounds. Yeah, and and so what

(31:20):
this thing does is it. It tries to capture all
of those subtleties and still make them translatable to a
digital medium. So you can you can send this signal
to your MIDI studio on your computer if you want to,
like you know, record the notation of what you're doing.
But you can also send it to controllers that you
can use, just like I was talking about with the electrumpet,

(31:41):
to you know, modulate the sound you create. UM and
and so I see that's one big avenue of change
in future instruments is sort of these electronic acoustic mashups,
trying to keep what's great about the classic instrument, but
to sort of beef it up with all this electronic
cape ability. This also reminds me of UM the artists

(32:03):
image and heap formerly fr fru had Um or Frau Frau.
I'm not sure exactly how that goes if you're British.
Has these these gloves that that she did a TED
talk about a couple of years back that UM were
inspired by gloves that she saw at the m I
T Media Lab designed by Ellie Jessup, and these through
gesture can control the reverb or grain of a note.

(32:24):
They can select harmony, change vibrato, and when she pairs
them with other software like I like a connect on stage,
she can use her whole body movement and interaction on
stage with the audience in order to change the sound
and add add in more sounds. She's got a little
microphones in her gloves so that she can live orcord

(32:45):
bits and live loop them into the music that she's playing,
so it becomes not just a performance, a musical performance,
but but almost a dance performance, right. You know. Part
of what she was saying about why she wanted to
create these things is that she she was a digital artist, um,
you know, working working with creating her own sounds and

(33:06):
and uh and and refining them on computers, and realized
that playing those for an audience was pretty boring. If
you're just stuck behind a keyboard or laptop, you know,
you might as well be checking your email. You know,
no one knows the another Another instrument that's similar to
that in the sense that I think, while it's cool,

(33:27):
it doesn't it doesn't necessarily do something that you can't
already do with other instruments, but as a new form
of performance and expression is called the alpha sphere, which
is you you imagine a sphere that's made up of
forty eight elastic pads. So these pads look like little
they look like little trampolines. And some of them are
bigger than others. So you've got some that are about,

(33:48):
you know, the size of a small saucer, and then
there's a few that are maybe the size of like
a half dollar or something in the United States, I
guess that doesn't help you if you're not from the US.
But anyway, they're varying diameters, and by pressing these different
elastic pads, you will create sounds because they're they're keyed
up two different sounds and uh. And by pressing, you know,

(34:11):
more firmly, it will change the quality of the sound.
By moving your finger around, it kind of bends the
note in various ways. And so you can actually play
a full song by manipulating all these different pads, and
it becomes more like again some sort of performance art.
You're watching an artist as they are manipulating this musical
instrument in an interesting way. And again, while the sounds

(34:32):
you hear are similar to that to what you would
hear and from maybe a synthesizer, it's visually really interesting,
and that becomes another element. So you might not necessarily
go out and buy someone's latest c D that they're
rock in the alpha sphere, but you might want to
go and see someone perform this live. UM. And it's
also got an LED light in the center that changes

(34:52):
color as you're playing, so it's very visually oriented. UM.
And then I've got the Eigenharp. Have you guys ever
heard the Eigenharp. It's really cool, very expensive electronic instrument.
It's supposed to be. According to to uh Eigen Labs,
which is the British company that offers up the Eigenharp,

(35:13):
they build it as the most expressive electronic instrument ever made.
It has seventy two keyboard keys, it has twelve percussion keys,
It's got a capacitance touch strip controller and a mouthpiece
that's optional. You don't have to have it in there,
but you can. And it looks like if you had
ripped the neck off of an upright bass and replaced

(35:38):
all the strings with lots and lots and lots of buttons.
And the capacitance touch strip is on one side of it,
so you can you move your hand up and down
the capacity, its touch scripts strip rather and you use
the different buttons to change the different sounds. And like
other instruments like the the artiphone that I mentioned earlier,
you can record loops and create an entire um song

(36:01):
that way. And in fact, when we do the blog
post with this, I will include a video that has
a guy playing a particular television theme song on one
of these things. And uh, and I was very much
amused and entertained. Um I when I first saw these
come out, the first thing I thought was, how can

(36:21):
we get one of those? For how stuff works? And uh,
at the price range, I don't think we can. Sadly,
might as well get a Dynamo phone. Yeah, I'm still
wearing a back order on that one. Okay, So I
wanna mention one really cool and really practical instrument, I thought, um,
which was the roly cboard? Right? This was? Wasn't this

(36:43):
one of the ones featured in the Georgia Tech Musical competition? Yeah,
we should mention the competition. So it's the musical maybe Guthman.
I've never actually attended it. It's but we'll see full
of pronunciation. It's the Guthman musical instrument. Competition at george
To Tech. So yeah, it's and it's a lot of
our ideas were uh instruments that were featured in this competition. Right.

(37:06):
So this is a competition that that Georgia Tech, which
is local to us. It's right down the street from
where we work. Uh. They have this competition every year
where they invite engineers and students and and musicians to
kind of submit these crazy awesome musical instruments that transform
the whole performance aspect of music or create music in

(37:29):
a way you had never expected before. And they actually
have a panel of judges look at these different musical
instruments and then hand out awards based upon which ones
they think are the most innovative and interesting. It's a
really cool competition and you should go online and read
about it if you get a chance. So the roly
cboard is I think it was. It won some prize
and I think it was second place. Okay, it's really cool.

(37:51):
You should check out the video that we're gonna put
up with this. So imagine an electric keyboard, just a
standard electric piano, except instead of rigid key ease that
you depress, it's got these flexible rubber keys and they
actually respond to the dynamic pressure of your fingers. Well,
that's just soft and loud, Joe. How wait, so they

(38:15):
respond to the pressure of your fingers. Think about the
same way a guitar player can bend a note by
like bending a string, so it's just volume, it's actually
the pitch of the note can change to too. Uh.
And the way a guitar player can create like tremolow
and like that, you can do just by pressing the keys.
So if you watch a player use this, it actually

(38:38):
gives more expressivity to what the pianists can play. Interesting
and and that's kind of cool because I see that
some of these things we look at like I think,
on one hand, they're really cool, But on the other hand,
I'm like, well, I don't know how much people really
use that. This one really struck me. I'm like, oh wow,
I mean I feel like people would use this. Could

(39:00):
I could easily see bands using something like that to
incorporate into their music, particularly if it's a band that's
known for exploring new sounds. Uh, you know that that
would I could easily see that being Yeah, anything like that.
That that gives you more control over the sound as
you are making It is not to talk down the
other really awesome instruments we feature, but just that some

(39:21):
of them are more they're like weirder, you know, some
of them are individualized something specific. Yeah, it's the sort
of thing that you would think of, like, you know,
you might go to say a Bjork concert and see
some pretty crazy technology used in creating that music, and
you might think this was an amazing experience. But at
the same time, you're not going to think everyone's going
to be doing this in five years want all the

(39:43):
music to sound like this. Yeah no, please no, but anyway, Yeah,
So that there are tons of different examples of instruments
that came out of that competition that are really pretty cool.
So yeah, and and then there are probably tons of
things that people are working on right now that we
don't even know about. Sure, I mean, the next electric guitar,

(40:03):
the next piano, you know, it might be something we
haven't even seen yet. I mean I've even seen someone
turned a Nintendo Wii into a theremin. Oh yeah, well,
so that ties into something I want to talk about
in two different ways. So there are certainly people who
have used sounds from video games in a fun way
sort of to uh sort of repurposed music. And I

(40:25):
think that's an interesting way of performing. You can take
all the sounds normally produced by a game boy, as
like sound effects or little musical blips that you might
play in your Super Mario World on your game Boy,
and actually make them into music based on their pitches. Sure,
and and kind of in the same way that I
think distortion of of guitars started out as something that

(40:45):
was a negative point, the way that these low fi
eight bit kind of sounds started out as as well,
that's as good as they get right now, sorry, guys,
it has turned into yeah, something something, Actually, it's something.
It's something that actually makes them unique, and they sound
kind of interesting now because of that. But the other
thing that video games made me think of is that

(41:05):
one thing in the future of musical performances, we might
have more just flat out more people who can perform
because of the idea of the gamification of music training. Now,
I play a musical instrument, uh, mostly just for fun.
I'm certainly not all that great at it, but I
play the guitar and and it it was a painstaking
process to learn to play. Um just I was in

(41:28):
my basement I was a teenager teaching myself and and
it probably shows because I never got very good, but
it's very rewarding, and I'm really glad I play now
because I have a lot of fun with it. Sure
do you all have any experience with that? With like
how rough it can be learning to play an instrument. Um.
I tried to have a friend to teach me how
to play guitar all of once and got really frustrated

(41:50):
really fast, and I don't think I've ever picked one
up again after after that. I do very much enjoy
singing and I and I do understand that vocal training,
like playing an instrument, is a really intensive process, and
I've never done it in an official kind of way,
but it's something that I have fun doing in my
kitchen when i'm you know, washing dishes or whatever. I
play apple a chan dulcimer. Taught myself how to play that,

(42:13):
but I also play ukulele. Taught myself how to play
that too. Um. Not very good at either of them,
and but I, again, I find enjoyment from it. But
you know, the whole idea of adding gamification so that
you have another reward system in place besides learning to
play in musical instrument is interesting to me, right totally
because yeah, you know, I just said that I don't

(42:33):
play any musical instruments, but um, but I had a
friend who hooked a midikit up to a actual electronic
drum set and used it to play rock band with
which which there are there's a rock band setting that
you can switch over pro drums and it will allow
you to work up to playing the way that the
song is played on a full drum kit at home,

(42:54):
and and I loved playing with that. That was actually
a lot of fun. Yeah, it's a lot easier to
learn to play when you can play in a in
a digital game environment, I think because just because there
you can program in so much incremental reward, uh and
and just kind of this naturally fun environment that takes

(43:14):
away some of the humiliating early stages. Yeah, what you're
saying there, and you're thinking, my hand does not make
that shape? How am I supposed to play this chord?
This hurts and it sounds bad, and and so that
makes me think that, well, if you can. So, there
are lots of people who can't play musical instrument, but
they can play the hell out of some Guitar Hero, right,
but then you get Guitar Hero and guitar playing are

(43:35):
very different exactly, and that's where I'm heading. You can
take so you've got a normal Guitar Hero controller that's
not really like playing guitar. It might have some of
the same skills, just like rhythm and coordination, right, But
I I do think that the rock band kids anyway
designed the button movements to mimic the chords on a guitar. Well,

(43:57):
but that's loose interpretation. They're all online, so it's not
like you have to move your fingers across the fret
the way you would. But I I know I've seen
some sort of some hacks and upgrades on similar games
that take a controller that's essentially like a real guitar,
or you can even just use a real guitar. Sure, yeah,
they have a fancy ones with all the buttons. Yeah right.

(44:20):
There's some that uh that Roland makes, for example, where
they have specific software where you can get a guitar
and you plug it in and you have it hooked
up to the software, and there are not just here's
how you play guitar type tutorials, but also they add
the gamification in there so that you are playing along
with known tracks, and at first you might just be playing,

(44:41):
you know, a certain percentage of the notes for one
of those those guitar tracks, and it's just so that
you get comfortable with the instrument and you can increase
the difficulty as you go along until you're actually to
the point where you can really play that musical instrument. Yeah.
So we we can imagine this easily with something like
guitar drums. It really any instrument that you can digitize,

(45:02):
you could probably create this kind of gamified training system. Yeah.
You could argue that one of the more advanced rock
bands they added keyboards to it, so essentially you were
learning to play keyboards with that game. Yeah. Yeah, that
was That was one I didn't really mess with that.
I was like, I'm going to leave that to Billy Joe.
I went to I went to E three where they
debuted that particular rock band, so I got a chance

(45:23):
to play with it before it even hit store shelves
and learned that that I may be a man, but
I am not divo. Um. Well, anyway, that the upshot
of that is that I think it's highly possible that
with advances like that we might be looking at a
future where even more people can play instruments, more people

(45:44):
will be will be out of the interest, And yeah,
I think that's a great future. I mean I as
someone who truly enjoys music it's and just the sort
of benefits you can get from learning to play, I
think that that's really encouraging, and I'm I'm certainly eager
to see that. I'm also aware that we will see
numerous YouTube videos of people who are in various stages

(46:07):
of of of expertise playing their musical instruments. That's okay,
too well. But the kind of music you produce for
public consumption and the kind of music that you produced
just to have fun playing it with the people, you know,
I mean, those are different levels and arguably serve different purposes.
Um and even if it's just the latter, you know,
if it's just people learning to play so they can

(46:29):
play with their friends and experience that kind of bonding
we were talking about, you know, even from the ancient
days and the origins of music, that's really cool. I agree. Well, uh,
you know, this has been a great discussion all about
the future of musical instruments kind of the way we're
going I think we are going to see this continuing
uh convergence of the digital and the analog, and and

(46:51):
this uh, this new evolution of musical instruments. Maybe some
of the ones we mentioned today will still be talking
about in you know, ten years. I think we'll see
a lot of other developments come out that will make
some of these seem quaint in comparison. And there are
certain musical form factors out there, things like the guitar
and the piano. I expect those will be around for it.

(47:12):
I mean, they've already proven their longevity. It will be
interesting to see if they are ever replaced by something else.
I mean, when you think about it, the guitar kind
of replaced a whole family of stringed instruments. Don't see
too many lootes out there these days. I think the
next big thing is the ok Arena of time. Yeah,
it's a great game, alright. So we're gonna wrap this up. Guys,
if you have if you think that this is pretty

(47:34):
awesome and you want to join in on the conversation,
maybe you are an expert musician and you want to
to let us know, point us to some videos of you,
you know, really rocking out. Let us know, go to
fw thinking dot com. That's the website where we've got
all of the podcasts, the blog posts, the videos, articles.
You want to go there and join in on the conversation.
We're also going to post up, like I said, a

(47:55):
blog post accompanying this podcast. We're going to have links
to differ print examples of what we've talked about, so
you can kind of get a an ear for some
of these strange instruments we've mentioned, and I think you'll
get a big kick out of it. And that's it
for us, But stick with us because we'll be talking
to you again, really simmer. For more on this topic

(48:18):
and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com,
brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places,