Instruments exist because people want to make them and use them.
They also serve important roles in societies and they often reflect the
peculiarities of particular geographies.

In this section we look at the people, places and instruments
that make up the Australian digital instrument making communitys.

Context - By Andrew R. Brown

The first use of the computer as a musical instrument in Australia was in 1951. Even though it was not interactive, Geoff Hill and Thomas Cherry’s imaginative use of the SCIRAC computer to play melodies was an auspicious start to Australasian digital music making (Doornbush 2001). Today’s digital instrument builders have also benefited from those who experimented with electronic instruments in the mid to late twentieth century such as Percy Granger, Ian Fredericks, Martin Wesley-Smith, Don Banks and Douglas Lilburn.

There has been limited documentation of the activities of digital instrument builders in Australia or New Zealand. Notable exceptions include Caroline Wilkins survey of some Australian builders (Wilkins 1997), a chapter in Michael Atherton’s book on Australian instrument makers (Atherton 1990), and a limited overview of activities in New Zealand by Michael Norris and John Young (Norris & Young, 2001).

Australia can also boast the first commercial digital sampler, the Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument) developed by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie and released in 1979. The Fairlight CMI also featured one of the earliest real-time digital sequencers and waveform editors. Its development was inspired by, and built upon, Anthony Furse’s work during the early 1970s on the Qasar digital synthesizer. Unfortunately, only prototypes of this leading work were realised (Atherton 1990).

Contemporary digital instrument makers work within the context of this history but. by and large, with little systematic leveraging of the accumulated experience through teaching, mentoring or even publication. Nevertheless, the amount of activity has been significant and outstanding work continues to emerge. That activity can be broadly categorised as public instruments, personal instruments and development toolkits.

Some instrument builders design their instruments for others to use; they build public instruments. Many of these instruments may have been played predominantly by their creators, but there is an attempt by the builders to design instruments with some generalisation or breadth of musical adaptation such that they might be useful beyond their own compositions. Makers in this section usually display a willingness to distribute their instruments or invite others perform on them.

Builders of personal instruments create instruments for their own use, and in many cases that may an instrument designed for an idiosyncratic or specialised in application. This category could cover many musicians, including every person who has every created a jMusic application or AudioMulch patch for live performance.

Toolkit makers, such as Ross Bencina who created Audio Mulch, Angelo Fraietta who created Algorithmic composer and CV-MIDI hardware, and the creators of jMusic, focus on software libraries and applications or hardware toolkits designed to support digital instrument making. These toolkits include a broad range of general functions that can be arranged to create new instruments.

Here is a list of sources of information about Australia’s instrument makers and their instruments.>>>