The

Evolution of the Musical Interface

Music has, and always will be an integral part of human culture. Once a society has basic
needs provided (food, shelter, and warmth) humans crave social interaction and
entertainment. Some of the oldest instruments were discovered to be over 40,000 years old
- flutes made from bone. We have no idea what the music might have sounded like; but we
know that there was music at this time. (Higham, et al., 2012)

This concept of blowing air through a pipe led to the development of the first organ around
2000 years ago. The concept of adding buttons or keys to control the notes led to the
creation of the first keyboard.

The modern keyboard is possibly one of the most recognisable interfaces that we have
today. The arrangement of eight white keys and five black keys per octave can be traced
back to the 14th Century with an instrument called a clavicytherium (seen in figure 1). This
same basic layout was transferred to other instruments, including the organ, the clavichord,
the harpsichord and the piano.

The familiarity of a tried and tested method of controlling an instrument was used and re-
used over and over again; once it had been proved to work there was no need to re-invent
the wheel.

It is also no coincidence that equal temperament has been in use in Western Classical Music
for almost as long. Equal temperament contains 12 semitones per octave, with each
"#
semitone having an equal ratio between the next ( 2). Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier
dated as 1722 is one of the best-known examples of music written for equal temperament,
with the work containing pieces written in all 24 possible keys.

Prior to equal temperament, just intonation was widely used. The frequency of notes is
related by ratios of small whole numbers such as in the harmonic series, which also meant
that music could only be written in a few keys due to the inherent dissonance.

This was an improvement from Pythagorean tuning, where only the 4th and the 5th were
consonant, with a ratio of 3:2. The Pythagorean major and minor thirds had ratios of 81:64
and 32:27 respectively, creating dissonance. Many of the chords that we are used to
hearing today were not possible, forcing composers to rely on simple texture and harmony.

Building a scale based on a circle of fifths only using the ratio of 3:2 also means that it never
completes its cycle back to the original starting note as shown in figure 2 comparing
Pythagorean tuning and equal temperament.

Throughout history, acoustic instruments have been based on small improvements over
many iterations. Wind instruments are all based on those ancient flutes, with
improvements in technology of material sciences and metallurgy leading to the complexity
of instruments such as the clarinet or oboe. Despite the complicated key work, it is simply a
vibrating column of air.

String instruments from all cultures use the same principle of a vibrating string, whether the
length is changed by the performer’s finger with the violin, mechanical keys like a hurdy-
gurdy, or frets on a mandolin.

Brass instruments are the simplest, with the player controlling their embouchure at one end
of a length of pipe, they can control which of the harmonics the column of air vibrates at.
Modern brass instruments added keys to divert the flow of air through different length
tubes, changing the fundamental tone.

The similarities between different instruments in the same family allows for performers to
play more than one instrument. The basic skills learnt from thousands of hours of practice
do not have to be re-learnt to play a new instrument. Modern musicians are normally
expected to play more than one instrument in many theatre orchestras. Figure three shows
the orchestration for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ‘In the Heights’.

Without the reliance on the design principles of the last several centuries and beyond, no
one player could achieve the professional standard required to play so many instruments.


Electronic instruments

With the advance of electronic instruments, the design began to move away from centuries
of design and musical traditions. One of the early electronic instruments was the Ondes
Martenot created in 1928. It used the familiar keyboard to control the frequency of
oscillations in vacuum tubes. Maurice Martenot was also a cellist, and wanted to combine
the versatility end expression of his instrument. He did this by adding a ring worn on the
finger that could slide up and down the length of the instrument, thereby removing the
limitations of a diatonic tuning system.

While this may seem a novel control method, it is an analogue of a string instrument, with
the length of the string (the position of the ring) determining the pitch.

Leon Theremin created the Theremin, also in 1928, which for the first time was an
instrument with a unique control method. The lack of physical contact and no haptic
feedback meant that for once, a completely new technique had to be learnt to play this
instrument.

The Buchla 100 Series created in 1965 could have been when instrument design took a new
path. This modular synthesiser did not have a keyboard built in, but rather it had different
controls to manipulate the oscillators that controlled the frequency of the notes it
produced.

However, it was in competition with the Moog Modular Synthesiser released in 1964 which
did have a keyboard to control it. The familiarity and sense of safety of this recognisable
interface led to the Moog being more popular, and with the price of both instruments being
so high, the success of the Moog led to the design of synthesisers incorporating the seven-
hundred-year-old keyboard.

Electronic music later moved onto the step sequencer. This allowed rhythms and pitches to
be pre-programmed and played back in sequence. The compromise with this however, is
reduced playability when performing live. A pattern can be manually altered as it is looped,
but this can be quite limited due to the complexity of many machines requiring multiple
steps to save each pattern.

Devices such as the Roland TR-808 allowed entire songs to be sequenced into the machine,
a precursor to modern MIDI sequencing. Drum sounds were synthesised in the device and
manipulated with knobs and switches.

MIDI controllers have followed the pattern of using existing technologies from the wider
world of computing and electronics. Rotary encoders and faders are taken from older
electronics. Multiple axis controllers are taken from joysticks. Music technology is forever
moving forward, but it is doing so with borrowed technology.

The innovators and designers of these instruments and controllers generally have a similar
educational background. They are taught at the same universities and take the same
courses. Research is piecemeal, standing on the same shoulders of the same giants.

There have been novel instruments such as the AlphaSphere developed in 2012. This uses a
set of concentric circles of pressure pads to control a synthesiser. The developer claimed
that it would not take very long for a performer to master this instrument.

The accessibility of a new instrument like this may be one of its weaknesses. An instrument
that can be picked up and learnt in weeks or months no longer has the elitism associated
with the rest of the musical world. If something is so easy to play, many musicians would
consider it a toy.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, art students such as Brian Eno began to change the music world
with recordings and pieces created using no instruments. Unlike music students who
considered the performance of one piece of music to be the perfection of the art form, the
techniques from the fine art world of slowly building a piece layer by layer began to
influence music. Aleatoric music, the manipulation of field recordings, musique concrete,
they all had one thing in common: there was no interface. What was created was directly
from the imagination of the composer; they were not limited by technology.

Systems such as MIDI and OSC leave the future open for developments in both control
methods and tuning systems. What is required is more cross disciplinary collaboration.
What the layperson considers to be music is deeply entrenched in centuries of tradition. A
composition that is discordant and non-musical to our sense of western music is still music –
an organised collection of sound.

For something new to be accepted, the public at large has to accept it, otherwise it becomes
a curio for niche group of researchers.

New music is out there, we just need to listen.