Music technology falls into three epistemes: acoustic, electronic, and digital

Magnusson frames the last three centuries as three instrumental epistemes. In the nineteenth-century acoustic episteme, instruments (piano, violin) have visible vibrating parts, music travels as printed scores, and to hear music is to perform it. In the twentieth-century electronic episteme, instruments are physical but their workings are hidden inside; sound is inscribed as an analogue waveform on recorded media, giving repeated plays of one performance rather than repeated performances. In the twenty-first-century digital episteme, the innards are wholly hidden (including in live coding, a high-level representation of switching electric gates); any gesture can be mapped to any sound, and the work is computationally notated as data or code. The epistemes are additive, not replacements: acoustic virtuosity persists alongside the new modes.

Examples

Piano in a factory + printed sonata (acoustic); synthesizer + vinyl record (electronic); a Strudel/SuperCollider live-coded set (digital). Note how ‘virtuosity’ shifts meaning across the three.

Assessment

Given an instrument or practice (e.g. a modular synth, a live-coded algorave set, a violin recital), place it in the correct episteme and justify using the criteria of visible workings, dominant medium, and mode of listening.