Thoughts on reading – September 2020

As I am just starting out with my PhD, I am allowing myself some freedom in my reading and how I respond to it. I am just soaking up some information. So far, this has included looking at a variety of mechanical musical instrument patents dating back to the 19th century and a paper by Bart Hopkin, written in 1991 but extremely pertinent to my work. Below are a few passages that resonated with me, followed by some lovely patent diagrams. See my PhD Reading List for more info.

Standardized instruments come complete with existing repertoire, pools of highly skilled players, a shared awareness of instruments’ capabilities and potentials
and commercial markets. They also come fully evolved in design. As a result, the maker need not spend countless hours working out answers to the myriad physical and practical questions that arise in the process of designing an instrument.

Without these benefits, taming an untried acoustic system for musical purposes can be difficult, slow and frustrating. Further, it is not always easy at the start to recognize whether a particular sound-generating system has the potential to produce results that justify the hours that may be required to develop it. In light of all this, staying with established types of instruments clearly has advantages.

Bart Hopkin

The question of social context in music making points to another element that recurs in contemporary instrument design: an interest in exploring alternative parameters of musical organization, and/or in ignoring those that have formed the backbone of conventional music making. Many new instruments produce wonderful and undeniably musical sounds, but ones that cannot readily be controlled in terms of rhythm or pitch. The player can only emphasize timbre or texture instead.

Bart Hopkin

With the creation of a new acoustic instrument, one creates a set of interrelated musical and extra-musical parameters,
and these parameters are often rather different in nature from those provided either by inherited music culture
or by electronic music systems. On one hand, those parameters impoverish the field of unrestricted possibilities of musical sound in the abstract. But on the other, they often bring forth particular sets of possibilities at which one working from the abstract would never have arrived.

BART HOPKIN