Dumb ways to play intelligent instruments
M. V. Mathews · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1979
In the last five years a new generation of digital instruments has been developed using the new integrated circuit technology. In contrast to previous digital instruments, which were confined to studios, these new instruments are small enough, cheap enough, portable enough, reliable enough, and powerful enough to form a new class of performance instruments. In addition to sound synthesis circuits, they include mini- and microcomputers with general computing power and with digital memories. Because of their computational power, we call them intelligent instruments. Musicians must learn very different performance techniques to take advantage of the potential of these instruments. In this paper we review some of the initial ways in which the instruments have been played. We conclude that although many of the performances are interesting, much must be learned before the full potential of these instruments is utilized.