Musical instruments ground players’ actions and the sounds they create. Yet this book further claims that instruments mediate perception and imagination. Practicing an instrument builds bodily skills, while also fostering auditory-motor connections in players’ brains. These intersensory links reflect the ways that a particular instrument converts action into sound, the ways that it coordinates tonal and physical space. Reactivated in various ways, these connections can influence instrumentalists’ listening, improvisation, and composition. To investigate these effects, the book engages both classical and popular styles, from Bach to electronic music, from Beethoven to the blues. It uses Lewinian transformational theory to model instrumental interfaces and to analyze patterns of body-instrument interaction. Though based in music theory and analysis, the book also draws on psychology, including cognitive neuroscience, and the phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. Ultimately, it argues that music cognition is not simply embodied; it is also conditioned by musical technology.

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Timbre often indexes an instrument’s materiality, and timbral variation often correlates with a player’s actions. Yet synthesizers complicate phenomenological links between sound and source. This chapter juxtaposes three instruments: an electromagnetic tuning-fork apparatus, developed by the nineteenth-century scientist Hermann von Helmholtz; the RCA Mark II, used by Milton Babbitt and other mid-twentieth-century composers; and the Yamaha GX-1, a large polyphonic synthesizer from the 1970s, played by Stevie Wonder and Keith Emerson. These synthesizers create new timbres and also imitate acoustic instruments, in a process that Robert Moog calls “timbral thievery.” Such imitations can provoke exaggerated or anxious discussions of synthetic and natural timbre. At the same time, performers may showcase the gap between timbre and instrument, exploiting a sense of uncanny or ambiguous sound sources for varied expressive ends. Ultimately, then, synthesizers help musicians both produce and conceptualize timbre.

What is ‘orchestral’ about a networked laptop orchestra? And what is network-like about a classical orchestra? This article juxtaposes orchestras, nineteenth-century music machines and twenty-first-century network music projects. Drawing on organology and cybernetics, it asks how these systems connect people and instruments. It considers interaction and coordination in particular networks, from the panharmonicon to PLork, but also their abstract informational topologies. Ultimately, orchestra machines, old and new, involve both technical and social organisation – and, as such, they can be used to problematise the ontological separation of technology and society.

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