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Jon Pigott (Cardiff Metropolitan University)

Repair And Conservation Of A Commercial Electronic Musical Instrument Archive.

This paper will explore the Townsend synthesiser archive through a lens of technological failure, repair, and conservation. In doing so it will include practices that occur inside the black box of commercial electronic musical instruments (CEMIs) within broader conversations of creative sound practice and research.  Possible questions that follow an endeavour such as this include:

  1. How / why might a commercial musical instrument archive be understood and explored through narratives of technological failure and repair?
  2. What are the implications of obsolete parts and changing social and economic contexts for the practices of conserving vintage hardware?
  3. What might be revealed when we read fault books, service manuals, cries for help on forums and ethnographies of repair cultures alongside accounts of creative sound making practice?

The Townsend archive is a unique opportunity to explore this topic as it is available for use, unlike standard museum archives where technologies are typically never to be switched on again. With use comes crackles, pops, noise, workarounds, and the occasional muttering of “is it supposed to do that?”. Some Technologies break, some are born broken, and some enjoy years of use in a state of disrepair alongside appropriations and modifications that were never intended by the manufacturer. User manuals, sales hype and software emulations are no help in uncovering these hidden narratives and realities of practice that accompany hardware, particularly vintage hardware. This approach has the potential to reveal something that Akrich (1994) describes as as the ‘world inscribed by an object, and the world described by its displacement’ through the unusual context of artefacts within a CEMI archive that have already ‘stabilised’ (Bijker 1994) as technologies but which require expert attention in order to remain stable enough to be used. 

This presentation will draw these themes and questions together within a framework of science and technology / sound studies, with a rich selection of visual and textural materials and examples drawn from service companies, service manuals and user forums among other sources.

Manuella Blackburn (Keele University)

Commercial Electronic Musical Instrument Sample Packs

Sample packs have a role in increasing the accessibility to the sounds of hardware synths and other physical electronic musical instruments. 

This practice of curating libraries of sounds for global ends users within music production industries affords availability to instruments/hardware previously out-of-reach for many due to costs, rarity of appearance or operation limitations.

This paper considers the process of curation and reductionism in sample pack creation when deriving a collection of sounds from an electronic musical instrument and explores how sample availability can shape our understanding of instrument capability, and how samples can also direct, guide and influence music making.The paper is formed while contemplating sample pack creation with the Pete Townsend collection of electronic music instruments and questions how a unique offering from this collection can be established and what this process might entail. The sample packs industry is a saturated marketplace offering beats, synths, instruments, vocals and FXs collections that, in some respects, operate as stand-in, representing their physical, real-world entities/equivalents. The movement from the physical world to the digital realm undergoes a process of selection and fixidity, where preferences over what to retain, discard or elevate have implications end-users and the resultant music.