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2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

From Musical Instruments as Ontological Entities to Instrumental Quality: A Linguistic Exploration of Musical Instrumentality in the Digital Era

Author : Caroline Cance

Published in: Musical Instruments in the 21st Century

Publisher: Springer Singapore

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Abstract

The development of electricity, sound technology, electronics and computer science during the last 150 years has allowed the emergence of new kinds of musical devices. This paradigm shift from traditional to digital instruments has strong consequences for instrument identity and for the relationship between the musician and her/his instrument. Grounded in a situated cognitive linguistics perspective, this contribution first explores various definitions of the instrument (from general dictionaries and musicology literature) before analysing how members of the computer music community name and define their instrument/interface/device, etc. Analysing the different strategies of instrument naming used by designers and users of digital instruments and by authors in computer music literature allows us to study the on-going construction and negotiation of a new terminology. By highlighting the instability, the fuzziness but also the diversity of what an instrument is to these different speakers, these analyses contribute to a better understanding of the conditions of instrumentality in the digital era. More than just referring to a device, the notion of instrument rather qualifies the interaction with the users, thus allowing a new shift from the instrument as an ontological entity to an instrumental quality.

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previous chapter Instrumentality. On the Construction of Instrumental Identity
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Footnotes
1
The ANR-2PIM Project in 2006–2009, involving music associations (Puce Muse, Grande Fabrique) and research laboratories (Labri, LAM, LIMSI, IRCAM, McGill).
 
2
My own translation.
 
3
For an extensive analysis see Cance et al. (2013).
 
4
Quite innovative in this particular domain, with the exception of Booth and Gurevich (2012), who proposed an ethnographic approach of ensemble laptop performance, and Stowell et al. (2008), who developed a qualitative evaluation of digital musical interfaces through discourse analysis.
 
5
All interviewees knew both the MI and the MM and had already used the MI and/or the MM before. As creators, developers, composers and/or performers, researchers, teachers or students from the conservatory, some of them combine different competencies and also use other devices they have or have not created themselves.
 
6
Interface is defined in the field of computing as “a device or program for connecting two items of hardware or software so that they can be jointly operated or communicate with each other” (OD).
 
7
Hedges in linguistics refer to all the markers of uncertainty used in discourse. In the following example they are underlined.
 
8
All the “irregularities” in speech, such as hesitations, disruptions and false starts (truncated words, repeated words or syllables, etc.).
 
9
Echoing the notion of “voiceless instrument” proposed by Bricout (2011) to take into account this particularity of the digital devices not generating sound by themselves but needing the computer and a specific algorithm to do so.
 
10
These questions were also asked to JIM conference participants in 2009 (see Cance et al. 2013).
 
11
Brunner in 2009 already developed a deep and sharp analysis of the “cultural implications embedded in the use and concept of instrument” in the computer music domain from a different perspective.
 
12
Published in La musique et ses instruments in 2013, this paper was written in 2009 in the context of the CIM09 conference. Therefore the first analysis concerned prior publications.
 
13
This is also the name of one of the main conferences in the domain: the NIME conference.
 
14
Instrumental quality is here preferred to instrumental identity as it bypasses the ontological issue.
 
15
This formulation alludes to Simone de Beauvoir’s famous “One is not born but rather becomes a woman.”
 
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Metadata
Title
From Musical Instruments as Ontological Entities to Instrumental Quality: A Linguistic Exploration of Musical Instrumentality in the Digital Era
Author
Caroline Cance
Copyright Year
2017
Publisher
Springer Singapore
Book
Musical Instruments in the 21st Century

Print ISBN: 978-981-10-2950-9

Electronic ISBN: 978-981-10-2951-6

Copyright Year: 2017

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2951-6_3

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