The workshops I run and many workshops I attend use a whole range of instruments which I tend to call "instant access" instruments, drums, rattles, shakers, xylophones, gongs and so on a wide selection of which can be bought through Sound Travels. It is interesting to trace the way in which these musical tools have entered our musical spaces, particularly since many if not most of them are non european in origin.
Earlier in the last century, it was Karl Orff, or to be precise, his colleague Hans Bergese, who designed instruments (based on rersearch and travel in the far east) which would be suitable for use in schools and which could be played instantly without the necessary long period of (often painful) training involved in learning the standard instruments of the European tradition such as viloins, flutes and french horns. These "Orff" instruments, as they are still known in some places, are indeed user friendly and a lot of teaching methodolgy developed around them. One anomoly, which still exists, is the practice of tuning these instruments, (box xylophones, glockenspiels, mettalophones) to the standard diatonic scale, as if their main purpose would be in recreating tonal music of the European tradition. This seemed to me to be not only pointless but counterproductive since the far more useable pentatonic scale is much more useful for the kind of improvisatory work for which these instruments are ideally suited. Tuning them to diatonic scales not only creates issues around what material to play (and most of the so-called "Orff Schulwerk" felt quaint and dated as soon as it appeared) but it also places them in the domain of specialist teachers with the result that most classroom teachers leave them to collect dust in forgotten cupboards.
More recently, these instruments have found a home in music therapy and also in community music workshops and have been added to by a wide range of "ethnic" instruments imported from all over the world, often mixed up together to represent a multi cultural canvas of sound which is often colourful, productive and fruitful. Whilst some workshop leaders will attempt to use these instruments authentically (for example, those djembe workshops which try to reproduce faithfully African traditional drumming) I prefer to encourage and initiate free improvising so that participants are not restricted in any way by notions of what is right or wrong. If it sounds good it is good.
So where does this leave music technology? In a recent training workshop (part of the Lifemusic programme running in Bognor Regis) participants were introduced to some of the latest digital equipment including soundbeam and ipod applications, synthesised sound as well as effects units which create a whole range of delays, repetitions, resonances, echo boxes and the possibility for amplification. There is no doubt that some of these are invaluable tools when working with people with physical impairments but the training day generated considerable discussion about the quality and nature of digital sound and its overall value.
Apart from the ever-present threat of ear damaging feedback (which makes us all nervous) there is the issue of the sounds themeselves and how the clinical "purity" of synthesised sound coming through speaker cones, blends with the natural quality of the sounds coming from sources which are being struck, shaken or stroked. It is not only the quality of sound but the kind of effort and the physical involvment and gestures involved in its creation which feeds into the musical meanings. How does a finger on a button or a touch sensitive screen equate with the whole body energy it takes to play the balafon, shake a maraca or even strike a triangle let alone to open the throat, fill the lungs and sing.
Or are the products of music technology in fact no different to any other musical instruments? As our trainer pointed out, it is only the mind of the musician employing the instrument which determines the quality of what comes out and this is as true for a tambour as it is for a Technics 23D.
My own feelings are ambiguous though most of the time I try to avoid anything amplified, digitalised or involving knobs. What do other workshop leaders feel about this question?