Volume 10, Issue 1, Summer/Fall 2007
Don Ihde
Pages 7-24
Technologies—Musics—Embodiments
Today recorded music probably accounts for the single largest category of music listening. This essay seeks to re-frame the usual understanding of the role of that type of music. Here the history and phenomenology of instrumentally mediated musics examines pre-historic instruments and their relationship to skilled, embodied performance, to innovations in technologies which produce multistable trajectories which result in different musics. The ancient relationship between the technologies of archery and that of stringed instruments is both historically and phenomenologically examined. This narrative is then paralleled by a similar examination of the history and variations upon recorded and then electronically produced music. The interrelation of music-technologies and embodiment underlies this interpretation of musical production.