Learning a musical instrument isn’t an easy task. Journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell helped confirm this in his book Outliers, which put achieving virtuoso levels of musical skill at around 10,000 hours of practice. This difficulty of learning an instrument may well be what puts most people off trying, with only 8% of people in the US having the patience to truly master an instrument.
Fortunately a new wave of intuitive digital instruments, which utilise everything from touch sensors to light displays, are changing the way we create music and, in the process, is attracting people who might otherwise have found it difficult to navigate traditional acoustic interfaces or more complex music software.
It’s a development that’s set to further democratise the music industry from the bottom up, in tandem with streaming sites like Soundcloud, which now has 175m active users sharing home-made content with a wider community each month, or Arduino, an open-source piece of hardware and software, popular with technology tinkerers and coders, that allows enthusiasts to experiment with new ways of making music.
“Working in a digital environment lowers the bar to entry,” says Jonathan Sparks, creator of Nomis. “It can be intimidating for a lot of people who are new to music to first pick what instrument they want to play, invest a significant amount of money to buy it and then commit a great deal of time and frustration into making it not sound terrible.” With technology-assisted instruments, however, learning how to play an instrument is not only easier for beginners but is also a more intuitive experience, which allows them to experiment much more. Musicians today face a tough choice.
These new digital innovations offer a third choice. These instruments also provide a stepping stone towards more conventional, harder-to-master acoustic instruments, and offer a way for people to engage in music who otherwise would not have been able to. British musician Stephanie Forrest, for instance, who has cerebral palsy, had never so much as dabbled in music until she picked up a Skoog, an instrument designed for disabled users.
A year later she made her first public appearances as part of the Technophonia ensemble in the 2012 Cultural Olympiad and has since performed around the UK playing a variety of electronic instruments. Digital instruments aren’t just gateway tools for non-musicians. Roger Linn, who created the first drum machine before devoting his life to the invention of popular digital instruments, such as the MPC, recently developed LinnStrument, a keyboard that straddles the capabilities of both digital and acoustic.
