Technology has always been an important part of the development of music. Musical instruments are perfect examples of technology developed to extend human capabilities. Presumably vocal music and percussion music must have existed before instruments were developed. How else could the idea of making instruments of music occur? Instruments were developed to extend music beyond what we were capable of producing just with our own voice or the sounds of everyday objects being struck.

The development of keyboard instruments (virginal, clavichord, harpsichord, fortepiano, piano) provides a good case study in how instrumental art and craft were driven by musical imperatives, and how music itself was affected by instrument development.

In the industrial revolution, the most transformative technology for music was the phonograph invented by Thomas Edison in 1877 and quickly improved upon by Alexander Graham Bell who developed the idea of engraving the sound signal horizontally on wax cylinders instead of vertically as on Edison’s tinfoil sheets. Bell’s device, patented in 1886, was dubbed the graphophone. At the same time, Emile Berliner was developing a method of engraving the signal horizontally on wax discs, patenting a device called the gramophone in 1887.

Another technology for music reproduction being developed at the same time was the player piano. Many inventors were experimenting with various technologies for a self-playing piano. The idea that eventually proved most viable was a pneumatic system inside the piano in which air from a foot-powered bellows passed through holes in a moving scroll of paper, activating valves for each key of the piano that moved a push rod to push the piano action, playing a note. The player piano became a viable commercial product in the first decade of the twentieth century, and reached the height of its popularity as an entertainment device in the next two decades, but radically diminished in popularity after the economic crash of 1929. Its fading popularity may also be attributed to the rise of radio sales in the 1920s.

The player piano figured in the work of at least two American experimental composers in the twentieth century who composed specifically for that instrument. In 1924 George Antheil composed an extraordinary work titled Ballet mécanique, to accompany an experimental film of the same name by the French artist Fernand Léger, which called for an ensemble of instruments that included four player piano parts, two human-performed piano parts, a siren, seven electric bells, and three airplane propellers. In the 1950s and ’60s Conlon Nancarrow composed over forty works, which he titled Studies, for player piano. Rather than record the music by playing on a roll-punching piano, he punched the paper rolls by hand, which enabled him to realize music of extraordinary complexity, with multiple simultaneous tempos and sometimes superhuman speed.

Thaddeus Cahill patented the Telharmonium, one of the first electronic instruments, in 1896. It was remarkable for its size and complexity, and for its ability to transmit its sound over telephone wires. It gained considerable attention and support from venture capitalists interested in marketing music on demand via the telephone. The idea eventually proved unsuccessful commercially for various reasons, not the least of which was the problem of crosstalk interference from and with phone conversations. The instrument was so large and unwieldy, and consumed so much energy, that it was abandoned and eventually disassembled.

An instrument of much more enduring interest was the theremin, invented by Russian physicist Leon Theremin in 1920, and patented in the U.S. in 1928. It was remarkable because it operated on the principle of capacitance between the performer and the instrument, so that the sound was produced without touching the instrument. It created a pure and rather eerie pitched tone, which could be varied in pitch (over a range of several octaves) and volume based on the distance of the performer’s hands from two antennae. The instrument has retained considerable interest and popularity over the past century, and has been mastered by several virtuosic performers, most famously Clara Rockmore.