ABSTRACT
Humans have been performing and creating music with instruments for tens of thousands of years, as evidenced by 30,000-year-old flutes1 made from bones, which serves as one of earliest known examples. Within a very small span of time, humanity has witnessed impressive technological leaps affecting all facets of life, including the way music is performed, disseminated, stored, created, produced, and used in educational contexts. In particular, since uncovering the secrets of electrical energy, the exploitation, control, and mastering laws of electron movement, every facet of music has been dramatically impacted. Rather than using bones to build flutes, we now have the ability to electronically generate pure tones and combine these sinusoids to create literally any musical timbre imaginable-and even timbres that have been ‘unimagined.’ Inversely, deconstructing a sound into atomic sonic building blocks is now straightforwardly achieved with any modern computer that can fit into one’s pocket. In the area of musical instrument technology, human-computer interaction (HCI) research has developed to a point that one can now use phones for playing music. The exploitation of technologies and machines that in the past were housed in huge air-conditioned rooms with expert operators and engineers is now readily available for the masses, enabling sound synthesis, sound recording, sound editing via computers, and playing such sounds via instruments. Technological advances in sound synthesis and microcontrollers have contributed to musical instrument technology development where a musical instrument sound no longer needs to be created by physical acoustic instruments-sounds can be virtually created in real time and transduced from electrical energy to acoustic energy via loudspeakers, where the only moving parts are those loudspeakers. In this chapter, we begin with a brief overview of instrument technologies, its developmental trajectories, philosophies, aesthetics, and trends. We also outline how instrument building technology has found a place in educational institutions and curriculums, especially in the context of hands-on, interdisciplinary HCI-based class settings. The chapter concludes with a summary and thoughts about the future of instrument technology and education.
