Current Trends in Electronic Music Interfaces

Throughout history, each set of technologies, from woodcraft to water pumps and from electricity to computers, has ushered its own set of changes into the way people generate and interact with music. Acoustic musical instruments have settled into canonical forms, taking centuries, if not millennia, to evolve their balance between sound production, ergonomics, playability, potential for expression, and aesthetic design. In contrast, electronic instruments have been around for little more than a century, during which rapid, often exponential (Kurzweil, 2000) advances in technology have continually opened new possibilities for sound synthesis and control, keeping the field in continual revolution and allowing few instruments to be mastered by a significant community of players. In fact, one might well ask what does " mastery " of an electronic musical instrument mean? A by-product of the power to create and manipulate artificial sounds is the ability to decouple the synthesis of an instrument's sound from the physics of the instrument's sound-producing mechanism , allowing musical controllers to diverge from the familiar physical forms of acoustic instruments. While this frees controllers to evolve along different paths, it also imposes constraints on an instrument's playing qualities because of limited control over and lack of connection to the sound production mechanism. Thus the normal path to learning an instrument-acquiring an increasingly complex representation of the relationship between one's actions as a player and the instrument's response-no longer holds because each instance of an instrument, controller plus synthesis model, requires that this mapping be learned anew. Indeed, electronic music controllers evolve so rapidly that it's rare for a musician to work long enough with one to develop virtuosic technique. Although bound by the limitations of available analog and vacuum tube or dynamo-based technologies, the very early pioneers of electronic music were highly motivated to explore expressive and unusual channels of articulation and control for achieving an evocative performance, perhaps because the electronic instruments were then in such an obvious contrast with their highly-expressive acoustic contemporary cohorts. We see this in the depression-sensitive, just-intonation keyboard and timbre controllers of the Telharmonium (Weidenaar, 1995), the radical free-gesture Theremin interface (Glinsky, 2000), the movable keyboard, knee pedal, and timbre stops of the Ondes-Martenot (Rhea, 1984), and the wonderfully expressive left-hand controller and multimodal keyboard of the Electronic Sackbut (Young, 1989). The introduction of voltage-controlled and modular analog synthesis (Pinch & Trocco, 2002) enabled the controller to be easily separated from …