Digital_Damage wrote:Playing an instrument does not make you a musician. Playing an instrument makes you an instrumentalist.
If you are asking if I’m instrumentalist, yes I play the piano, guitar and viola.
If you are asking if I’m a musician, yes I read, write and arrange music and understand the principles of music theory to a degree that allows me to create scores.
The APC is not an instrument by any definition regardless of “patches”. It produces no wave lengths. The computer does produce wave lengths so there for it can be considered and instrument if it meets the other necessary requirements.
The APC is a control surface.
Glad you have all of these things figured out in your own mind. In the "actual world," where ideas and concepts are being debated regularly, the lines between interface (what you call a control surface) and instrument are certainly becoming blurred, whether you like it or not. You may want to (narrowly) define an instrument as only that which can produce wavelengths, but even in the case of the computer, is it the CPU itself which creates the actual vibration you hear? Or the DAC? Could we pull the computer apart to find only one single element that you might consider the instrument?
From the New Grove article for "Instruments, Musical":
Instruments, Musical.
Objects or devices for producing mus. sound by mechanical energy or electrical impulses. They can be classified as:
(1) Str. (plucked or bowed).
(2) Wind (played by blowing direct into the mouthpiece or through a reed).
(3) Perc. (of determinate or indeterminate pitch).
(4) Elec.
Not that the New Grove should be taken as the end-all-be-all, but it
is the premier scholarly encyclopedia of music and musical study in English. So the portion of the definition about "electrical impulses" would seem to run contrary to your own definition as we would have to agree that an electrical impulse from the APC40 does have the ability to produce a musical event. So is the APC40 itself an instrument? Is the computer alone the instrument? Or is a new concept of modular instrument construction emerging as a result of these practices? I've had this debate before and the result is usually an acceptance that you can break most instruments into components that generate sound and components that interface with the human. The problem with your argument is, without the interface there is no sound, no event is triggered. So it's not as cut and dry as you would like to make it, I think.
*Posted by an instrumentalist (trombone/voice/double bass/electric bass/Chapman Stick) and musician (MM in theory / Ph.D. candidate in theory and composition)
