Apart from singing and bodily percussion such as clapping and stamping, music making is highly reliant on technology. From the simplest forms of blowing through a pipe or hitting a resonant object to the mechanical complexity of a grand piano or pipe organ, and from early electrical instruments like the theremin to the latest AI, musical creativity is guided, inhibited, distorted and enhanced by the restrictions, affordances and influences of technology. This project seeks to bring together various threads of research which look into the finer grain of specific contexts and examples under this larger umbrella. By bringing these threads together, can we discern patterns of creativity, behaviour and thought that are common to these different contexts, or can we devise theoretical frameworks that can be tested across multiple contexts, technologies and frameworks? Areas to be explored include:

• The ways in which the influences, affordances and restrictions of technology design and configuration affect musical practices.
• The ways in which the influences, affordances and restrictions of culture and society affect the development and usage of technology in music.
• The ways that wider theories of technology development and usage can inform and shed light on its uses in music.
• How concepts such as progress, modernity, authenticity and tradition (and theories about them) can be used to understand and influence musical practices.