Play That Funky Music, Android

and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we were going to talk about the future of music, specifically when it comes to musical performance, and kind of talk all about how how sometimes the instruments that we have at our disposal can actually shape the way we create music, and the sound of the music can actually create entire revolutions in music. I got an interesting trivia question for y'all. All right, what's older music or farming. I'm gonna go with music music. Yeah, yeah,

because agriculture. I mean, I sit there and think about that. Like, I'm sure when we were hunters and gathers were still bashing a little ewoks skulls to make the music because we had walks before we had it was a long time ago, Lauren, but it wasn't in a galaxy far okay anyway, So yep, numb. So that's for the old school fans who like the pre uh messed with version of the original trilogy. Well, yeah, actually, uh so the even the e Walks had music, and they were a

fairly primitive society. Yeah that they didn't have a lot of advanced technology, but they still had a fairly robust music scene. Is it fair to I honestly don't know the answer to this, and maybe you you do, Joe, because you were looking into some of the earliest musical instruments, right, Uh, is it fair to say that some of the earliest musical instruments were percussion instruments? Well, they could be. Uh if we're part of the problem is we just don't

know how old because so few things survived. We know, Um, we know music is older than say, agriculture, because we have a pretty good idea that agriculture began about ten to twelve thousand years ago, and when the rolling stones are older than that. We have musical instruments that are

we now believe about forty years old. Yeah, not percussion instruments, but the percussion may have preceded them because obviously, what were the first musical instruments, Well, they were our bodies, right before people were building things with their bodies and were building you know, making tools. Yeah, they were. They could clap and they could sing. And there's actually some really interesting research about why singing started. Yeah, well, I

mean think about it. Why did we start making music instead of just comun talking or grunting or etcetera. Gesticulating. Yeah, One interesting theory is that music performance started um as sort of an organizing principle for tribes of apex predators. So it was staying Yeah, and so you listen to the way wolves howl, Well, wolves howl for lots of reasons.

We think some of the main reasons they do it are to establish like a a social dominance hierarchy, to establish the borders of their territory, and to sort of create a defense alertness network within their territory UM and to sort of coordinate during hunt's interest. And those are all characteristics that would be displayed by predators, actually predators, which are the same kind of role that early hominids would have played, like Neanderthals and our direct dominid ancestors um.

And so there's a pretty good there's a pretty good basis there for thinking, wow, well, maybe our ancestors had organized systems of vocal calls the same way that wolves have howling systems, but obviously we have um more versatile vocal cords than wolves do, and so we have even more ability to you know, maybe we could kind of create an even more intricate and and well thought out system of vocal signals, and from there you have the idea that well, maybe that's how the first songs came about.

And of course, I mean, this whole topic ties in very closely with the one we looked at earlier, the storytelling topic and the idea of how music has become part of our way of sharing stories and h and culture to a point where you know, you could imagine a lore teller someone who is in charge of gathering information about the people and passing that on also communicating that in the form of song, which can make things easier to remember and can also have a very very

deep emotional impact, as anyone who enjoys music can tell you. I mean, I know there are people out there who just don't get music. It's just doesn't speak to them in any way. But for others, like I include myself in this, certain types of music can get a huge emotional response from me. Kenny g makes me really angry, it's it's obviously not my favorite form of artistic expression. It's harder for me to consume it than other forms of art, so I I tend to consume less music

than other things. But it, but it definitely has a huge um I think a mnemonic impression on our brains. That the patterns and the mathematics and it are something that the bits of your brain that you're not using to listen to the words of a story you are going to kick in well. And it's hard to deny that it's deeply social's singing together with people really helps. It creates a sense of oneness and harmony, a kind

of you know, a spiritual bond. I've even seen each other some recent some recent scientific studies that have suggested that singing with a group of people can help improve your mood drastically, Like it can be a true psychological aid for for people who are suffering from a depression or they're just they have anxiety issues. Um, assuming that you don't have an anxiety issue with singing with a group. But but but it is it's more like kind of

choral singing. It's not that it's not like you know you're gonna get singled out to do a crazy Yeah, so all of that obviously speculation. I mean, there's just there's no physical evidence for that. It's just we we can look at how other animals behave and we can sort of guess how things like that came about, but there's no way to really know. What we do know UM, and that can be tested by radiocarbon dating and stuff.

Is that at the at the very latest thirty five thousand years ago, and some new tests reveal probably more like forty to forty two or forty three thousand years ago. We had bone flutes um found in caves in Germany. There are these uh flutes made from the birds of bones and and they're just little hollow bird bones, but they've they've clearly been carved, so they're carved holes along the length of the flute um where you would place

your fingers to cover them up and create notes. And researchers who found these have created wooden replicas that they say are are pretty solid, like you can play them and create some pleasing harmonic frequency. So the other thing we wanted to talk about before we get into some of the crazy instruments that we've seen UH that are are trying to either reshape music or just create new

ways of playing music. We wanted to talk a little bit about some of the instruments that were really familiar with today that had uh through their creation and and people playing them, have really transformed music in big ways. Now, there are way too many to name. I mean, obviously if we were to go and and even if we were to just focus on just the the Western Hemist fear musical traditions, because obviously music is very different in

different parts of the world. We all have different rules for the way we make music, We have different instruments that we play, there are different techniques, but there are certain ones in the Western traditions that have had an enormous impact, particularly on modern music, the music that we listened to today. Um. You know, clearly we could talk about even the invention of just the guitar itself, and not the electric guitar, but just the guitar, which came

in pretty late in the Renaissance. But I think the one we really wanted to start with it was a different musical instrument, one that is featured still quite heavily in music today, the piano, right right, Yeah, Um, well, stringed instruments appear in basically every culture across the globe.

Everyone has versions of these, But the piano itself was not invented until about seventeen hundred, or maybe innovated as a better word, because before the piano, we had the harpsichord and the clavichord, and these were two, um, two stringed instruments, the clavichord being a having these bi chord strings that were struck by tangents at the end of the keys that you would press down. Um, just a

really simple lever motion. Um. It allowed for dynamic expression the way that we get in a in a modern piano. But it was very quiet, but beyond about you know, the length of a room, a good few feet beyond the actual instrument, you couldn't hear it very well. So it wasn't a concert piece at all. UM, And the harps harpsichord was a little bit louder Um. That's a that's a set of strings that are plucked by quills

moved by jack's when you press the keys. So it's an extra layer added on to that basic lever motion. But uh, it was it wasn't as dynamic. It was

a pretty um uh steady level of sound. You can get the emotion that you can that people talk about getting from piano out of a harpsichord, right like with a piano where you can you can press the different pedals to to allow a string to be somewhat muffled or make it louder with a With a harpsichord, you you push a key, and that sound that you get as the same sound you're going to get no matter

how you push that key right exactly. And you know, but beyond the pedals, what's really innovative about the piano is that um, you can you can press a key at a different um, different hardness or softness, and get a different sound out of that string. Um. And and those innovations were all due to um. Bartolomeo Cristoforio maybe that might be how you say it, who worked for the Royal court. He was Italian, an Italian craftsman of harpsichords. He worked for the Royal Court of Italy at the time,

repairing their their machines, music machines. And yeah, he created a whole bunch of innovations that a lot of them were so complicated that they didn't actually come into common use until a century later because they were so expensive

to to create. I mean really really interesting things like a like an escapement mechanism that let the hammer fall away from the string instantly after the hit, so that, um, you know, it would it would let the string vibrate freely, or a stopper to prevent the hammer from coming back and hitting the key, all kinds of all kinds of stuff that that sounds really simple when you say it out loud like that, but it was was really completely

revolutionary for the instrument. And at first they were so so individual and expensive to make that they really were

only used by royalty and extremely famous concert players. But but innovations eventually let them be smaller, added more keys, added greater expressions of sound, and um, they wound up being in basically every affluent home and eventually every home period, allowing people to learn how to play music on a very you know, the keys are laid out in this very obvious way on like a guitar where you have to kind of play with the frets and figure out

how to how to do these complex hand motions. You can just look at a keyboard and see where your sounds are going to be coming from. Oh yeah, there's a very obvious visual correspondence between the keys and the musical scale itself. Sure, sure, although of course you can play with such great complexity that for some of us that obviousness is obvious skated by the deft fingers of a talented pianist. Well, it is interesting just to think

about everything that the piano allows you to do. I mean, it's sort of the one stop shop for the single composer. You know, you can use a piano to compose much more complex pieces of music. Sure, sure, yeah, you can. You can hold a note with a single key the way that you can't on a lot of on on a lot of the predecessors. And um and yeah, and and dynamic is the word that people always apply to

it in this kind of literature. And it's it's fascinating that, um yeah, I mean, you know, so solo piano concerts didn't happen until like the eighteen hundreds, and and it's such a such a major part of musical existence these days. But you know, it's it's they couldn't be incorporated into concerts until Christopheros. Um. Yeah, the fourte piano or piano forte,

which of course means uh. Well, if it's fo four to forte, piano means loud soft and pianoforte means soft loud, meaning that this instrument was capable of of producing both types of sound, either the very soft, subtle sounds or it could be quite loud and dramatic. But the interesting thing to look at here is not just how this is. Well, it's a cool instrument. It makes a new sound. It

actually changed music. Sure, it changed the whole music scene, and it changed what people would do and the kinds of songs they would write. Yes, yes, And it eventually, like you were saying, Lauren, I mean, the fact that pianos became more affordable ad meant that it was a more accessible instrument for a larger potential audience. So you started seeing pianos being that that sort of became the

entrigue musical instrument for a lot of people. Now Ever, since most since a lot of households had them, um and since especially women were expected to know how to play to entertain their families, but we're not expected to appear on stage. In fact, it women were banned from the stage for playing pianos for a long time, ragtime

and jazz. In fact, we're partially originated on pianos due to due to different different ways of playing uh using the instrument to play right, I was going to pick up with another musical instrument that truly revolutionized music, although uh when it was being worked on it was being during the invention of it, that wasn't necessarily the intent.

That's the electric guitar. Now, the electric guitar, the first one really that we can point to, was designed by Lloyd lore in N who was an engineer with Gibson Guitar Company, and he had created was called an electric pickup. Now, this pickup is essentially it's an electro magnet that is part of the guitar and um and it's hooked up to a pre amplifier. And what happens is when the string vibrates, it creates a fluctuation in the magnetic field.

That fluctuation in the magnetic field induces a current through the pickup, which then goes to the pre amp where it can amplify this tiny electrical current and turn into something that that can then be sent on to other equipment like speakers, so that you can actually have a much louder sound come from a guitar, because one of the problems was that trying to play something like a guitar, which does not make like acoustic guitar, does not make a very loud sound in the grand scheme of things,

if you want to play for a really large group, it's very difficult to do. If you're incorporating it into a larger orchestra or exactly. Uh, you could put a microphone directly in front of the the the instrument, but that usually meant that you had some distortion of what the sound was like, and you wouldn't get a true representation of what a guitar sounded like. You would get some something that would be musical, but you would have some artifacts in that a little bit. Yeah, there's more

for feedback also, that's also true. Yeah, So so doing this was kind of getting around that, and in fact, for the longest time, electric guitars were really just meant to be a representation of what an acoustic guitar sounds like, just louder. Now, I've seen a lot of arguing about when the actual first what we should call an electric

guitar was put together. So there's some people say that It wasn't really until the Rickenbacker frying Pan uh and other people would say that the other models around nineteen thirties, say, late twenties, early thirties. Yeah, there was a Hawaiian guitar that was played. It was like a lap guitar you played in your lap and it had that sort of kind of twanky sound that you would associate with Hawaiian music.

That was one of the earliest electric guitars. But I mean, it's is one of those things where it all depends upon whose definition you you, uh, you pay attention to when you're talking about the modern electric guitars. Something that really shaped the music in a in an interesting way. You gotta get all the way into really the nineteen fifties. That's where you start seeing the electric guitars that really had a big impact. And that's where you see the

guitars from uh Leo Fender. You know, he created the first mass produced solid body electric guitar in nineteen fifty and then you had less Paul. Of course, everybody thinks he invented the electric guitar. Now he certainly, he certainly had played a huge part in and of course he built his own electric guitar called the log that looked like just a big solid piece of wood that fit into another body. So that but he was it was sort of a his own little hobby, but it was

never meant to be sold as an actual guitar. UM but his models started hitting the market in nineteen fifty two, and uh, this was when you started seeing musicians play with the fact that they could create different sounds with an electric guitar by messing with different settings and creating distortion and echo effects, this sort of thing where they weren't trying to accurately recreate the sound of an acoustic guitar.

They were trying to make new sounds. And there was a little bit of um, not a little bit, there was. There was quite a bit of resistance in some in some genres of music when the electric guitar became prominent, So rhythm and blues and rock and roll, obviously they they adopted the electric guitar pretty quickly. Other genres were slower. In fact, when Bob Dylan showed up with electric guitar, that was that was a controversy in the folk music world.

I can't believe you've betrayed us. Country music also, I mean there was there were certain types of country music that that adopted it quickly, but um, these these were instruments that eventually became the backbone of a lot of popular music today. Obviously, not every genre of music relies heavily on on electric guitars, but a lot of it does. If you listen to your typical radio station in America,

for example, you're gonna get a lot of electric guitar. Well, it's not as uh as central in every genre as it is in in say, your standard rock and roll band, but you'll find it featured even as a background or textual instrument in tons of music. Sure, yeah, most. And that also brings us to another musical instrument that has become pretty heavily featured in a lot of music, the synthesizer. And this sort of ties into where we're going to

be going with this in the future. But I want to talk about first the one of the earliest h This is not truly a synthesizer in in the respect that it was never called that, but it was a musical instrument that I had to talk about, the tell harmonium, also known as the dynamo phone, dynamo phone Dynamo phone. It was the saxomaphone and the Dynamo phone. It was invented by Thaddeus Hill or K. Hill. And uh, it was a steam powered synthesizer with it had steam powered steamer,

a steamer you might want to steam powered instrument. It had electromagnetic generators, and it had a It had velocity sensitive key is like a piano, meaning that if you played the keys gently, it would make a softer sounds. So this is something that tries to kill you in BioShock. It could create different sounds simultaneously, so you could actually have it make different quality sounds. And uh, and it weighed a mirror two hundred tons. Two hundred tons steam

powered synthesizer. I want this what I could play heart and soul on that for defeating your enemies and driving them before you. You don't even have the missical ax in your hand. So now the first synthesizer that was actually called a synthesizer was made by Harry f Olsen and Herbert Blair for our c A in nineteen sixty three. Are a quote unquote Bob Moag, Thank you Noel for the correction, Thank you Joe for letting me let Noel

know that he was thanked for the correction. UH created a voltage controlled oscillator and amplifier module with a keyboard. Would we now call the move synthesizer, despite the fact that his last name apparently was pronounced Mog. So here's the cool thing is that Noel's actually gathered a little bit of a Moog synthesizer. So you can hear what it sounds like, a SUSI hear it. You're going to

recognize that sound. I guarantee it, alright. So, and of course synthesizers became another one of those things that that went beyond what the intent was. The intent originally was to try and create a musical instrument that could recreate certain sounds, that could synthesize the sounds of other instruments and do it in a way where you could, you know, have have at your your disposal and entire orchestra, even

if you just had one instrument. However, they the sounds of synthesizers were pretty distinct, or another way of saying that is, they didn't sound anything like the actual instruments they were trying to to emulate at that time. In fact, they were kind of hilarious. It certainly was. I mean, those early synthesizers were hilarious. If you wanted to listen to, like, this is what a piano sounds like. It doesn't sound anything like any piano you've ever actually, yeah, or or

banjo or whatever. It just be this weird kind of electronic sound that sounds almost but not quite exactly, not like what it was supposed to sound like. But the cool things that musicians found ways of making music with this where that was that was the the draw of the music. It wasn't that they were trying to make the synthesizer be some other musical instrument. They were using the synthesizer for what it was, right. They realized that it had its own unique sound that that could be

incorporated into questionably pleasing music. I'm not gonna go with questionably pleasing you, or you get to go sit in the corner of shame. Because new wave new wave music I'm I'm I'm mostly I'm mostly the roots that our theme we new wave music. That I loved the new wave era. So we're talking about the early eighties when we had all this music here in the United States. We had all this music come over from the UK, where it was a lot of bands experimenting with different

sounds and different instruments, including synthesizers. There were a lot of sythen I'm giving it crap, but I would give any genre crap. I think that, I think that any genre is technically m questionably pleasing. Well, oh, I mean again, it's hard to imagine the music scene today without computer generated tones. Sure, I mean that that come a long way. And early synthesizers weren't computer generated tones, sorry, electronically generated.

I mean now we have I guess you'd say digitally generated. Sure, sure, Sure that that day that auto tuning became a thing that people did on purpose, as opposed to something to correct the occasional sharp or flat note, suddenly became a style. The whole purpose of auto tuning was for it to be unobtrusive, that you wouldn't notice that it was happening. And then you started to get artists who again took this tool that wasn't meant to take center stage and

turn it around. I remember I did a podcast about the auto tuning software and the creator was sort of amused that it had become this this tool for people to make songs. That's really they're using it for the opposite reason for why I made it, by the way that guy now makes and did at the time, makes software to help oil companies find oil under the ground through sound. It's true, that's terrific. That is interesting how like a tool designed as a recording tool became a

weapon of performance, to be fair. To be fair, he was working on that first and then came up with the auto tune idea. So it's it's sort of but but they were related. So that's interesting that, like, we found oil and we were able to make this guy sing okay. So we know that new music is brought about by new instruments. When you've got something different in your hands that makes a different sound, that's played in

a different way, it creates news genres. And that's why it's hard to predict what the music of the future is going to sound like, because you don't know what people are going to be using to create it necessarily right now. I think one thing we can definitely predict is that a lot of the music performance in the future is going to be electronic. It's going to be digital. A lot of people will be you know, they're performing

their music with a laptop. But that aside, what are the kinds of instruments that we think might be coming about to change the way we produce music in the future. Well, sure, I mean, we've got lots of people musicians, engineers, scientists, mad scientists, all coming up with different ways to create music.

And we've all sort of gone out and kind of looked up some different musical instruments that are kind of, you know, they're on the cutting edge, or some of them are a little you know, quirky or more like performance art based type stuff. But we wanted to talk a little bit about some of the kind of creative approaches to creating music. I've got I've got one right here called the art of Phone. Have you guys heard of this? Okay, So the art a phone kind of

looks a little bit like a guitar. It does have it's got a neck with with sort of fretwork, but it's all digital threats and you actually plug an iPhone into this this device, and the iPhone has an app that works with this particular device. So you plug the iPhone in and that's what allows you do select different songs, different sounds, different things like the percussion. You can create loops so you can play something, loop it and then add in a drum track and loop that and add

in another track. You can play it like it's an upright basse. You can play it like it's a violin. Uh. And it actually has a little digital touch area where that acts like the strings. You move your fingers against that, and that's what allows you to play this thing. And um, you know, we're going to create a blog post. We're going to include links to these different devices so that you can actually listen to what they sound like. I listened to this one on a video on YouTube, and

it was pretty impressed with what it could do. I mean, considering that this is using a smartphone as the real brains of the device itself, it was really kind of remarkable and that you could even with this thing, create music files in different formats and export it directly from the instruments. So you have a if you wanted to compose something, you could do your percussion track, your bass track, your main track, recorded all on this one device and

export and you've got a song. Pretty neat. Yeah, My and my my favorite thing about about this incredible future of of technology that we're currently experiencing. Is that really with with things like capaciti of touch, anything can become an instrument. My a few months back, my very favorite Raspberry Pie application of the day, because I have a new one about about every day, UM, was something called

a beat box. This is a b e et box because because it's a wooden box with an audio amplifier, UM and root vegetables placed in the top and uh and and with the circuitry from the Raspberry Pie, you touch the beat and it and it creates a percussive sounds, so it registers your touch and that becomes that's insane, so you can actually play vegetables. Joe, do you want

to take a swing at one of these? Well? Uh, First, I guess I want to talk about how one type of thing that I definitely see happening is this sort of acoustic electric mash up okay type of instrument that we see a lot of. Um. We can talk in a minute about this, uh this awesome music instrument design festival that they have Georgia competition around here, but a couple of the coolest enturies, like one example is this thing uh called the elect trumpet, which is. Uh, it's

an acoustic electric mash up. So it's a it's a traditional acoustic trumpet that you play like a normal trumpet, except in addition to the traditional controllers that control airflow and stuff like that, it also has digital controllers so you you hook like I think. It also has an

iPhone as the main controller of interesting. Yeah, and so it's got multiple types of buttons, so while you're playing the trumpet like you would normally play a trumpet, you can also manipulate digital controllers on it to create all kinds of you know, weird effects, manipulate and modulate the sound you're creating. Um. Another one is this is really cool? Uh. Keith McMillan Instruments produced this thing called the Cabo Violence. Yeah. I watched the video that you sent out with this.

That was really I mean, it was very alien sounding to me because it doesn't sound like anything else you've listened to. Necessary So what is what is this thing? I didn't I didn't actually have time to check it out. Well, it's it's a so it's a violin bow um. Actually it can go with ultimple instruments. Is violin, viola, cello

and bass um but so it's a stringed instrument bow. Essentially, what I think he's trying to do with it is to um capture both the original sort of full range of dynamic expression and emotion that you can get with a stringed instrument, which is really hard to capture in like Middi's say, electronic music. To get all of that depth of expression and the different subtleties of that sound

with digital control at the same time. So this is a bluetooth enabled bow UM that connects wirelessly with a piece of software on your computer so that while you play, you're getting all the let's see here it's got on

the press release, so it's got um. It's since his motion on the X Y and z axes, grip pressure, hair tension, tilt, angle, and the position of the bow relative to the instrument, and like all of what you had dinner, but all of the but like a stringed instrument player will tell you all those different things, uh go into creating the very complex texture of sound that you create with a string. Sure, it's how the bow is interacting with the tension of the string and therefore

creating a library of sounds. Yeah, and and so what this thing does is it. It tries to capture all of those subtleties and still make them translatable to a digital medium. So you can you can send this signal to your MIDI studio on your computer if you want to, like you know, record the notation of what you're doing. But you can also send it to controllers that you can use, just like I was talking about with the electrumpet,

to you know, modulate the sound you create. UM and and so I see that's one big avenue of change in future instruments is sort of these electronic acoustic mashups, trying to keep what's great about the classic instrument, but to sort of beef it up with all this electronic cape ability. This also reminds me of UM the artists image and heap formerly fr fru had Um or Frau Frau. I'm not sure exactly how that goes if you're British.

Has these these gloves that that she did a TED talk about a couple of years back that UM were inspired by gloves that she saw at the m I T Media Lab designed by Ellie Jessup, and these through gesture can control the reverb or grain of a note. They can select harmony, change vibrato, and when she pairs them with other software like I like a connect on stage, she can use her whole body movement and interaction on stage with the audience in order to change the sound

and add add in more sounds. She's got a little microphones in her gloves so that she can live orcord bits and live loop them into the music that she's playing, so it becomes not just a performance, a musical performance,

but but almost a dance performance, right. You know. Part of what she was saying about why she wanted to create these things is that she she was a digital artist, um, you know, working working with creating her own sounds and and uh and and refining them on computers, and realized that playing those for an audience was pretty boring. If you're just stuck behind a keyboard or laptop, you know,

you might as well be checking your email. You know, no one knows the another Another instrument that's similar to that in the sense that I think, while it's cool, it doesn't it doesn't necessarily do something that you can't already do with other instruments, but as a new form of performance and expression is called the alpha sphere, which is you you imagine a sphere that's made up of forty eight elastic pads. So these pads look like little they look like little trampolines. And some of them are

bigger than others. So you've got some that are about, you know, the size of a small saucer, and then there's a few that are maybe the size of like a half dollar or something in the United States, I guess that doesn't help you if you're not from the US. But anyway, they're varying diameters, and by pressing these different elastic pads, you will create sounds because they're they're keyed

up two different sounds and uh. And by pressing, you know, more firmly, it will change the quality of the sound. By moving your finger around, it kind of bends the note in various ways. And so you can actually play a full song by manipulating all these different pads, and it becomes more like again some sort of performance art. You're watching an artist as they are manipulating this musical

instrument in an interesting way. And again, while the sounds you hear are similar to that to what you would hear and from maybe a synthesizer, it's visually really interesting, and that becomes another element. So you might not necessarily go out and buy someone's latest c D that they're rock in the alpha sphere, but you might want to go and see someone perform this live. UM. And it's also got an LED light in the center that changes color as you're playing, so it's very visually oriented. UM.

And then I've got the Eigenharp. Have you guys ever heard the Eigenharp. It's really cool, very expensive electronic instrument. It's supposed to be. According to to uh Eigen Labs, which is the British company that offers up the Eigenharp, they build it as the most expressive electronic instrument ever made. It has seventy two keyboard keys, it has twelve percussion keys, It's got a capacitance touch strip controller and a mouthpiece that's optional. You don't have to have it in there,

but you can. And it looks like if you had ripped the neck off of an upright bass and replaced all the strings with lots and lots and lots of buttons. And the capacitance touch strip is on one side of it, so you can you move your hand up and down the capacity, its touch scripts strip rather and you use the different buttons to change the different sounds. And like other instruments like the the artiphone that I mentioned earlier, you can record loops and create an entire um song

that way. And in fact, when we do the blog post with this, I will include a video that has a guy playing a particular television theme song on one of these things. And uh, and I was very much amused and entertained. Um I when I first saw these come out, the first thing I thought was, how can we get one of those? For how stuff works? And uh, at the price range, I don't think we can. Sadly, might as well get a Dynamo phone. Yeah, I'm still

wearing a back order on that one. Okay, So I wanna mention one really cool and really practical instrument, I thought, um, which was the roly cboard? Right? This was? Wasn't this one of the ones featured in the Georgia Tech Musical competition? Yeah, we should mention the competition. So it's the musical maybe Guthman. I've never actually attended it. It's but we'll see full of pronunciation. It's the Guthman musical instrument. Competition at george To Tech. So yeah, it's and it's a lot of

our ideas were uh instruments that were featured in this competition. Right. So this is a competition that that Georgia Tech, which is local to us. It's right down the street from where we work. Uh. They have this competition every year where they invite engineers and students and and musicians to kind of submit these crazy awesome musical instruments that transform the whole performance aspect of music or create music in

a way you had never expected before. And they actually have a panel of judges look at these different musical instruments and then hand out awards based upon which ones they think are the most innovative and interesting. It's a really cool competition and you should go online and read about it if you get a chance. So the roly cboard is I think it was. It won some prize and I think it was second place. Okay, it's really cool. You should check out the video that we're gonna put

up with this. So imagine an electric keyboard, just a standard electric piano, except instead of rigid key ease that you depress, it's got these flexible rubber keys and they actually respond to the dynamic pressure of your fingers. Well, that's just soft and loud, Joe. How wait, so they respond to the pressure of your fingers. Think about the same way a guitar player can bend a note by like bending a string, so it's just volume, it's actually

the pitch of the note can change to too. Uh. And the way a guitar player can create like tremolow and like that, you can do just by pressing the keys. So if you watch a player use this, it actually gives more expressivity to what the pianists can play. Interesting and and that's kind of cool because I see that some of these things we look at like I think, on one hand, they're really cool, But on the other hand, I'm like, well, I don't know how much people really

use that. This one really struck me. I'm like, oh wow, I mean I feel like people would use this. Could I could easily see bands using something like that to incorporate into their music, particularly if it's a band that's known for exploring new sounds. Uh, you know that that would I could easily see that being Yeah, anything like that.

That that gives you more control over the sound as you are making It is not to talk down the other really awesome instruments we feature, but just that some of them are more they're like weirder, you know, some of them are individualized something specific. Yeah, it's the sort of thing that you would think of, like, you know, you might go to say a Bjork concert and see some pretty crazy technology used in creating that music, and

you might think this was an amazing experience. But at the same time, you're not going to think everyone's going to be doing this in five years want all the music to sound like this. Yeah no, please no, but anyway, Yeah, So that there are tons of different examples of instruments that came out of that competition that are really pretty cool. So yeah, and and then there are probably tons of things that people are working on right now that we

don't even know about. Sure, I mean, the next electric guitar, the next piano, you know, it might be something we haven't even seen yet. I mean I've even seen someone turned a Nintendo Wii into a theremin. Oh yeah, well, so that ties into something I want to talk about in two different ways. So there are certainly people who have used sounds from video games in a fun way sort of to uh sort of repurposed music. And I

think that's an interesting way of performing. You can take all the sounds normally produced by a game boy, as like sound effects or little musical blips that you might play in your Super Mario World on your game Boy,

and actually make them into music based on their pitches. Sure, and and kind of in the same way that I think distortion of of guitars started out as something that was a negative point, the way that these low fi eight bit kind of sounds started out as as well, that's as good as they get right now, sorry, guys, it has turned into yeah, something something, Actually, it's something. It's something that actually makes them unique, and they sound

kind of interesting now because of that. But the other thing that video games made me think of is that one thing in the future of musical performances, we might have more just flat out more people who can perform because of the idea of the gamification of music training. Now, I play a musical instrument, uh, mostly just for fun. I'm certainly not all that great at it, but I play the guitar and and it it was a painstaking

process to learn to play. Um just I was in my basement I was a teenager teaching myself and and it probably shows because I never got very good, but it's very rewarding, and I'm really glad I play now because I have a lot of fun with it. Sure do you all have any experience with that? With like how rough it can be learning to play an instrument. Um. I tried to have a friend to teach me how to play guitar all of once and got really frustrated really fast, and I don't think I've ever picked one

up again after after that. I do very much enjoy singing and I and I do understand that vocal training, like playing an instrument, is a really intensive process, and I've never done it in an official kind of way, but it's something that I have fun doing in my kitchen when i'm you know, washing dishes or whatever. I play apple a chan dulcimer. Taught myself how to play that, but I also play ukulele. Taught myself how to play that too. Um. Not very good at either of them,

and but I, again, I find enjoyment from it. But you know, the whole idea of adding gamification so that you have another reward system in place besides learning to play in musical instrument is interesting to me, right totally because yeah, you know, I just said that I don't play any musical instruments, but um, but I had a friend who hooked a midikit up to a actual electronic drum set and used it to play rock band with which which there are there's a rock band setting that

you can switch over pro drums and it will allow you to work up to playing the way that the song is played on a full drum kit at home, and and I loved playing with that. That was actually a lot of fun. Yeah, it's a lot easier to learn to play when you can play in a in a digital game environment, I think because just because there you can program in so much incremental reward, uh and and just kind of this naturally fun environment that takes

away some of the humiliating early stages. Yeah, what you're saying there, and you're thinking, my hand does not make that shape? How am I supposed to play this chord? This hurts and it sounds bad, and and so that makes me think that, well, if you can. So, there are lots of people who can't play musical instrument, but they can play the hell out of some Guitar Hero, right, but then you get Guitar Hero and guitar playing are

very different exactly, and that's where I'm heading. You can take so you've got a normal Guitar Hero controller that's not really like playing guitar. It might have some of the same skills, just like rhythm and coordination, right, But I I do think that the rock band kids anyway designed the button movements to mimic the chords on a guitar. Well, but that's loose interpretation. They're all online, so it's not like you have to move your fingers across the fret

the way you would. But I I know I've seen some sort of some hacks and upgrades on similar games that take a controller that's essentially like a real guitar, or you can even just use a real guitar. Sure, yeah, they have a fancy ones with all the buttons. Yeah right.

There's some that uh that Roland makes, for example, where they have specific software where you can get a guitar and you plug it in and you have it hooked up to the software, and there are not just here's how you play guitar type tutorials, but also they add the gamification in there so that you are playing along with known tracks, and at first you might just be playing, you know, a certain percentage of the notes for one of those those guitar tracks, and it's just so that

you get comfortable with the instrument and you can increase the difficulty as you go along until you're actually to the point where you can really play that musical instrument. Yeah. So we we can imagine this easily with something like guitar drums. It really any instrument that you can digitize, you could probably create this kind of gamified training system. Yeah. You could argue that one of the more advanced rock bands they added keyboards to it, so essentially you were

learning to play keyboards with that game. Yeah. Yeah, that was That was one I didn't really mess with that. I was like, I'm going to leave that to Billy Joe. I went to I went to E three where they debuted that particular rock band, so I got a chance to play with it before it even hit store shelves and learned that that I may be a man, but

I am not divo. Um. Well, anyway, that the upshot of that is that I think it's highly possible that with advances like that we might be looking at a future where even more people can play instruments, more people will be will be out of the interest, And yeah, I think that's a great future. I mean I as someone who truly enjoys music it's and just the sort of benefits you can get from learning to play, I think that that's really encouraging, and I'm I'm certainly eager

to see that. I'm also aware that we will see numerous YouTube videos of people who are in various stages of of of expertise playing their musical instruments. That's okay, too well. But the kind of music you produce for public consumption and the kind of music that you produced just to have fun playing it with the people, you know, I mean, those are different levels and arguably serve different purposes.

Um and even if it's just the latter, you know, if it's just people learning to play so they can play with their friends and experience that kind of bonding we were talking about, you know, even from the ancient days and the origins of music, that's really cool. I agree. Well, uh, you know, this has been a great discussion all about the future of musical instruments kind of the way we're going I think we are going to see this continuing uh convergence of the digital and the analog, and and

this uh, this new evolution of musical instruments. Maybe some of the ones we mentioned today will still be talking about in you know, ten years. I think we'll see a lot of other developments come out that will make some of these seem quaint in comparison. And there are certain musical form factors out there, things like the guitar and the piano. I expect those will be around for it.

I mean, they've already proven their longevity. It will be interesting to see if they are ever replaced by something else. I mean, when you think about it, the guitar kind of replaced a whole family of stringed instruments. Don't see too many lootes out there these days. I think the next big thing is the ok Arena of time. Yeah,

it's a great game, alright. So we're gonna wrap this up. Guys, if you have if you think that this is pretty awesome and you want to join in on the conversation, maybe you are an expert musician and you want to to let us know, point us to some videos of you, you know, really rocking out. Let us know, go to fw thinking dot com. That's the website where we've got all of the podcasts, the blog posts, the videos, articles. You want to go there and join in on the conversation.

We're also going to post up, like I said, a blog post accompanying this podcast. We're going to have links to differ print examples of what we've talked about, so you can kind of get a an ear for some of these strange instruments we've mentioned, and I think you'll get a big kick out of it. And that's it for us, But stick with us because we'll be talking to you again, really simmer. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com,

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