Neville Fletcher -- neville.fletcher@anu.edu.au
Research School of Physics and Engineering
Australian National University
Canberra, Australia
Popular Version of Paper 4pMU10
Presented Thursday afternoon, October 25, 2012
164th ASA Meeting, Kansas City, Missouri
Musical instruments have been part of human culture throughout nearly all of our history. They began as pairs of sticks clapped together to provide a rhythmic accompaniment to songs or dances and then evolved to more sophisticated forms as technology became available. Wind instruments were some of the earliest melodic forms because of the availability of bamboo tubes and they imitated in some ways the songs of birds. This evolution continues today and we can guess at some of its future.
The Bronze Age, which began about five thousand years ago, centered on the development of this copper-tin alloy for military armor. Bronze was hard and a low melting point and was readily cast into different shapes. Rounded helmets gave rise to gongs with a definite pitch and ultimately to heavy bells with sustained sound, while the nearly flat sheets of shields led to the shimmering sound of cymbals. Bells were rung by groups of men but in the 16th century a keyboard mechanism led to the single-player carillon.
Another military or hunting tool that led to musical instruments was the bow and arrow. The twang of the string when plucked by a finger had a definite pitch, and a set of strings or graded length tied to a flat board to increase the radiated sound evolved into the harp. A keyboard driving a set of plucking quills then gave the harpsichord in the 15th century and there has been a recent revival of interest. A more portable type of instrument used only about half a dozen strings but had ridges or “frets” on a fingerboard against which the strings could be pressed to change their length. The most popular modern version is the guitar. Another way of sounding strings was to tap them with a light hammer and this led to the clavichord, then the fortepiano and finally the modern pianoforte, which is perhaps the most common of all modern musical instruments
All these instruments produced decaying sounds, but another technique developed from drawing the string of one bow across the string of another and this produced a sustained sound. From this came “bowed string” instruments, which could have only a few strings to allow access for the bow. They therefore had fretted soundboards like guitars and a “bridge” linking the vibrating string to a soundboard on the top of a cavity. These were the viols and similar instruments which ultimately evolved into modern violins, violas and cellos with no frets. Ultimately a whole octet of instruments was developed based to match the acoustics of a classical Italian violin. This “New Violin Octet” has proved popular, but there is not much music requiring the large range of pitches provided.
Wind instruments come in three varieties but nearly all involve a tube or horn. The flaring horn of a conch shell, blown through a small hole by the player’s vibrating lips, eventually gave rise to brass horns or trumpets, and these were refined by addition of sliders or valves to change the sounding pitch. Bamboo pipes with one end closed by the natural partition could be played by blowing across the open top and were usually grouped together to form a set of Panpipes that could be used to play tunes. This ultimately had added a bellows blower and then a keyboard to produce a pipe organ, modern organs having as many as ten thousand different pipes. The other evolution was to add finger holes in the side of the pipe giving instruments such as the recorder and later the flute, these finally acquiring a complex key mechanism to cover the entire pitch range. One end of the bamboo tube could also be partly closed by a thinned bamboo reed to produce the forerunner of modern clarinets, oboes and other reed instruments, also with key valves as well as finger holes.
There is a difficulty because there are twelve semitone notes in an octave and the human hands have only ten fingers between them. The bassoon is a good example, for while the first, second and third fingers of each hand have only a single hole to open or close, the left thumb has to control a group of nine keys! Modern technology has developed a “logical bassoon” with an electromechanical action controlled from a simple key panel, but this does not seem to have “taken off” yet.
Modern technology has done a great deal for musical instruments by providing means by which the actions of the player can be reproduced to repeat the performance. One of the earliest of these technologies was the “player piano” or “pianola” in which the key strokes and pedal motions of a performance were recorded by punching slits into a moving paper roll. The pianola had a pneumatic action in parallel with the mechanical action of the keyboard, so that the paper roll could be used to reproduce the performance. Of course it allowed things to go one step further and to encode on the roll keyboard strokes that exceeded the possibilities for a single player. Even more impressive is the provision of electromagnetic operation in parallel wsith mechanical operation in some large concert organs. This allows the organist to record his playing as a set of key and pedal motions and then descend to the audience seats to assess his own performance. The development of electronic “synthesizers” to produce a huge range of musical sounds has expanded over recent decades and they are able to synthesize entirely new “imagined” sounds for a variety of applications such as background music for films or other performances.
The availability of modern electronic techniques invites a speculative look at further possibilities for the future. One of the most interesting is the cochlear implant or “bionic ear” which converts a sound into an electrical signal and feeds this directly into auditory nerves leading to the brain. This eliminates the necessity for converting a synthesized musical signal into sound before it is listened to – it could simply be fed directly into the brain through the cochlear implant using an electrical or radio connection. One could go further and note that devices are being developed that allow immobile individuals to control to a limited extent helping devices such as robotic hands, using brain impulses fed to it through electrodes on the scalp, but a robotically played instrument is not required as the control signal could be enhanced in a computer and then fed to the listener’s auditory system through the implant. Indeed this would allow a composer to “think” a composition into existence and transfer it by a radio link directly to the brain of the listener, probably with another radio receiver recording the composition for posterity.
In my view these possibilities take us too far – ultimately they would lead to a community of immobile humans linked together by radio that could convey music from the composer to the listener without ever converting it to sound. But I think we are safe – there is increased interest in restoring early musical instruments and using them to play the very best compositions from today and from the past. Long may this continue!