Music
What will musicians be playing in the year 2100? Some of these new-fangled inventions maybe.
From skiffle bands playing tea chests and Congolese bands making electronic instruments out of colonial rubbish to techno-making oddballs like Look Mum No Computer, musicians have been inventing new kinds of instruments for centuries. Most of them never catch on. But others, however slowly, become instruments of the future. Whether they're celebrated by the annual Guthman Musical Instrument Competition or they're just strange ideas looking for crowd-funding, there are new instruments out there that will be played well into the next century.
The current crop of new-fangled ideas is bewildering to navigate so here's a handful of instruments that might just have a chance.
The Automated Toolkit
It's still early days for this device from Berlin's Dadamachines. Controlled via a tablet with all the right software installed, the main part of the Automated Toolkit is its Automat controller. It has 12 DC outputs that can be plugged into motors, LEDS and microphones, which can then play everyday objects as musical instruments. And if you want to create an orchestra out of all the things found in your garden shed, you can buy extra devices and hook them all up.
Laser Harp
Musician Leo Bettinelli has transformed the classical instrument used so bewitchingly by Joanna Newsom into a futuristic hi-tech wonder. His creation – straight out of a sci-fi film – is a large, two-dimensional, two-metre-by-two-metre grid of 16 laser beams hooked up to a computer. Players' movements through the beams are then turned into sounds based on voltage variations. We're not sure what that means, exactly. But the noise it makes is very cool.
Nomis
Apart from festival-headlining DJs who are allowed lavish light shows and garish stage set-ups, DJ performances can – visually at least – be a rather limited spectacle. Which makes Jonathan Sparks' Nomis a welcome addition. The idea of his instrument is to make loop-based music more exciting to watch by turning particular notes into displays of light. Users wear a data glove – like those used in VR – and move their hands through the "polyphonic octagonal interface" to create movements that the computer translates into music and light. Fancy.
Yaybahar
Turiskh musician Gorkem Sen's invention looks like a ancient instrument from an isolated corner of the world somewhere. Perhaps it was inspired by those traditional devices, but the yaybahar is actually a groundbreaking creation: an acoustic string instrument that sounds like a synthesizer. Musicians stroke the horizontal strings, pluck the vertical ones, and drum the feet. You can swap the fretboards, too, once you've mastered it.
Optron
Shake it like you mean it. Chet Udell's design looks a lot like a light tube from an overhead kitchen lamp, but it's actually the sort of thing that noise bands will be falling over themselves to get hold of. The tube combines blindingly bright LEDs and electronics and is played by moving it around – tilting, shaking, strumming, whatever. Each movement activates different sounds and lights.
Cantor Digitalis
This singing synthesizer won the 2015 Guthman prize and it's not hard to see why. An open-source, real-time singing synthesizer, it's played via hand gestures, as well as stylus and fingers, on a graphic tablet (or soundplane) plugged into a computer. You can pick various styles of voices or add your own, then change the pitch, add tension or breathiness, prolong vowel sounds and even make it sound like a baby or an animal. Or a baby animal. Whatever takes your fancy.
Tenori-On
Björk, Four Tet and Peter Gabriel are all fans of this little gem, which has been around for a little while now. Created by Japanese artists Toshio Iwai and Yu Nishibori for Yamaha, it's a handheld, double-sided, 16-by-16 grid of LED lights that respond to touch and records and plays real-time loops. It also comes with inbuilt speakers, making it a dream for electronic musicians on the move. Plus it looks like a computer game.
Du-Touch
It might look like an accordion from the year 3010 but this toy-like creation won't wheeze or splutter – or give you backache. Comprised of 26 hexagonal buttons running up each side, Dualo's tactile D-Touch lets you pick a sound – percussion, synthy melodies, space-age whooshing, whatever – and then it's up to you to play around with the notes and beats. It records loops, too, so that players can build songs as they go.
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