Once the notion of augmented instrument clarified, let’s already have a look at physical and mechanical augmentation of instruments. This will show us the principles of augmentation, to better understand the electronic instrumental augmentations.
We are going to observe two instruments - the piano and the flute.
The piano
The aim of the piano-forte, invented in the beginning of the 18th century by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence, was to increase the dynamic of the instruments he manufactured - the harpsichords. In the end, however, the principle used is that of the clavichord where the string is strucked instead of plucked. Then, and because the hands are occupied playing on the keyboard the only solution for expanding the sonorities of the piano-forte was to add gestures with the feet. The first solution is to change the timbre of all the played notes with one or more pedals. Below you can hear the change of timbre on Mozart’s piano-forte, where instead of pedals, which didn’t yet exist, you pressed on wooden pieces with your knees.
In the 19th century, numerous manufacturers in Paris competed with inventions and patents to increase the sound possibilities of the piano by adding pedals producing all sorts of changes of timbre.
For example, this tambourine piano for which it is boasted:
One pedal brought into motion with more or less force, is sufficient to obtain from the tambourine and its jingles, effects as varied as pleasant and which unite harmoniously with the sounds of the piano.
Another solution is to make it possible to play more polyphonics by adding a pedalboard to play the notes like on an organ.
Eventually, in the 21st century, the augmentation of the piano is realized with the help of electronics.
Researchers from Queen Mary University in London propose, in 2009, to augment the piano with the use of a magnetic resonator. The strings of the piano vibrate thanks to electromagnets installed above them. It is thus possible to change the dynamic of a chord once the note has been played - which is totally new on a piano.
The flute
The transverse flute, originally made out of wood, has undergone a great number of changes, one of the aims of which was to increase its volume. It was in 1832 that Theobald Böhm created the first version of his system for the transverse flute. He considerably increased the volume of the instrument and introduced a system of keys which bears his name.
In the 1980s, research carried out at IRCAM in Parisaimed to increase the sound palette of the flute. The solution - the MIDI flute - consists in adding interrupters on the keys of the flute. This makes it possible to command the computer with a sweet name, the 4X, simply through the flutist’s finger movements. The musician plays their instrument normally, producing sound on their flute. The computer, however, recognizes the keys that are being pressed during the performance. As a consequence, the computer is able to apply transformations on the flute sound that is picked up with a microphone.
This procedure has the advantage not to disrupt the musician during the performance and yet augment the instrument. On the other hand, the whole augmentation process is realized by the computer and the musician cannot intervene themself.
But the arrival of computers and of so-called “real-time processing” does not exclude physical augmentations of the flute. In 1992, American flutist Robert Dick proposes a first prototype of flute transformation that let's him play glissandi. The manufacturing started in 2002, and it is interesting to note that the idea came to him from Jimi Hendrix’s concerts, where Hendrix played the whammy bar on his electric guitar. The whammy bar is a sort of vibrato, controlled with a metal bar on the guitar.
It is of course possible to augment both the flute and the piano using the Sampo. Based on the same principle as Mozart's pianoforte - that the hands are occupied - the Sampo uses expression pedals to modulate the sound of the instrument. Unlike the MIDI flute, it is the performer who controls the instrument's sound transformations, thus mastering the entire performance.