The important thing about the relationship between music and technology is that it’s entirely circular. Composers or instrument-makers notice a new way of making a noise – an electronic valve for example.
They then build a rudimentary instrument using that. Composers and musicians start working with it and immediately demand improvements, so the designers go back to work and an improved version appears. The improved version immediately offers musical possibilities that never existed before, so people start making new music with this new instrument, music they had never thought about making before. Then of course the instrument-makers respond with further modifications as the nature of the new instrument begins to become clearer, so the cycle is self-feeding.
The grand piano is a good example. The concert grand piano as we know it today really depended on the state of iron-casting technology. Prior to the pianos of the mid-19th century, frames were wooden, so the pianos could only be put under a certain amount of tension and therefore could never really be that loud. The first iron-framed pianos were called pianofortes: the important part of that word is “forte”.
The piano forte could be used against a full orchestra and still be heard. That led directly to new forms of music which would not have been conceivable before. So it’s that kind of process that is going on all the time in music.
Music always co-opts whatever is the state-of-the-art technology at any given time, so it’s quite consistent that in the Forties and Fifties, people started looking at electronics. Electronics had started becoming available and people could start making things. In fact, the particular form that Oram worked in, which is basically drawn sound, was pioneered by some Russians in the Twenties, who realised that optical soundtracks on films could be a way of making music, so that became their experiment.
via Brian Eno on bizarre instruments – Telegraph.
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