From mechanical to digital instrument : music and new technologies

International audienceAs far as music is concerned, instruments have always been part of a cultural “landscape” (on technical, expressive and symbolic levels). This talk explores the changes brought about by the shift that occurred during the 20th century, from mechanical to digital instruments (also named “virtual instruments”). History of music and its instruments is not independent of history in general as far as humans are concerned: history of ideas, history of arts, history of technology, history of their languages, aesthetical and emotional values. The invention of the telephone and the phonograph, almost contemporary to each other, disturbed our “traditional” relationship to sound, voice and music, by allowing transmission and recording of sounds. From then, sounds could “travel” through space and time. Artists and poets, such as Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Marcel Proust, Guillaume Apollinaire, among others, have been very impressed with these inventions and their consequences. Developments in electricity and digital technology later increased the “distance” between the body and the instrument in music production: · electricity, by bringing new energy, previously mechanical, to machinery and instrumental devices; · digital technology by operating a radical decoupling between musicians' actions and effects on the intruments due to symbolic information encoding and processing. Such (r)evolutions have artistic, cultural and social irreversible consequences. Therefore, it is not surprising that, alongside with these developments, new artistic sensibilities, new philosophical and scientific paradigms have been invented and experienced. First, a short recall of some historical steps of the technological developments that have renewed our relationship to sound, music, and instruments will be presented. Then the concepts of "instrumentality" and "expressiveness" will be introduced. Indeed, a lot of musical instruments are built, or tuned, in order to obtain non-linear behaviour, depending on the way they are played. These features are very important for expressiveness and identification. In addition, sound synthesis is not only signal synthesis. The way signals are transduced into sounds is very important for the « truthfulness » or the materiality of sounds. So, our last researches tends to control the entire chain from musical gestures to sound radiation