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i wonder what the next instrument will be

will the 21st century bring us something new or are we living in very nostalgic times trying to forget the chaos engulfing us all and unable to innovate

maybe we peaked as a civilisation with the electric guitar and will never discover guitar 2

if i'm to be fairer, the synthesizer is not just one instrument but a class of instruments… all of which were invented in the 20th century. the modular synth, the keyboard, the drum machine, the groovebox, the vocal synthesis, the rack-mount rompler, even the software plugin!

though Hatsune Miku is a classic instrument of our times and she didn't grace us until 2007. perhaps we can simply choose to consider vocal synthesis to have been invented then

@hikari "But what about Hatsune Miku-"

Okay so I saw this was a thread so scrolled up to read from the beginning, started typing that Miku / Vocaloid was a 21st century instrument while continuing to read and then saw that yeah, you do mention Miku 2 posts later

Also as much as I love Hatsune Miku and a lot of early vocaloid was formative and she is absolutely an icon of this century...alas, I cannot honestly say she qualifies for the nigh-unattainable credentials a hypothetical "Guitar 2" would need

@hikari it's really interesting if you look into how the drumkit developed ex nihilo. Apparently it came out of New Orleans marching bands

@mcc i tweeted this thread because i discovered to my horror that the bass guitar as a concept is basically always electric, for amplification reasons, and so the “electric bass guitar” is better known as the “bass guitar”, because it replaced the… contrabass. and in that moment i realised all the “standard” instruments that aren't the piano are very “new”

@mcc the drumkit is a weird one because it is an instrument but technically it's as old as drums itself in some sense???

@mcc (drums… themselves?)

@hikari the modern idiom of it is pretty recent and took a good 30 years of iteration to hit it's modern form

@mcc where are the start and end of those 30 years, roughly speaking?

@hikari I will send you a video later it is interesting

@mcc @hikari Also the electronic organ is a "new" (20th century) instrument! (Technically the very earliest electric organs were at the very end of the 19th century, but they didn't really evolve into the modern thing until the 1930s)

@adrienne @mcc oh yes i think there's a few keyboard-based instruments i'm glossing over here. another is the electric piano, but i suppose that's just a different piano

@hikari @mcc The modern piano only dates to the 1860s, for that matter! (It's an evolution from the older pianoforte, but it really is a technically different critter!)

@adrienne @hikari the technology behind flywheel organs is actually kinda wild