Instrumentalizing seeks to discover the performability, intrinsic sonic palette and possibilities for sonic manipulation of objects. It can be exercised on any object that has the potential to sound or manipulate sound in real time, and it need not be complex. Sticks, combs, tables, cases, shoes and vegetables are a few of the objects that have been successfully explored as sound‑making devices for improvised performance. There are also many examples of the ‘re’, or more accurately ‘de’, contextualizing and adaptation of a wide range of technologies. This includes those designed for music production to equipment that was intended for use in telecommunications, medicine, electrical engineering, entertainment and toys, road safety, surveillance, radio technology and domestic appliances.

However, there has been little discussion about how one approaches the activity of exploring a sounding object as a musical performance tool.

As had been the case for ‘exotic’ sonorities during previous centuries, sounding objects that could not contribute pitched material were often presented or perceived as percussion during this early period. Again, Cage heralded the trend by suggesting that ‘Percussion music is a contemporary transition from keyboard‑influenced music to the all‑sound music of the future. Any sound is acceptable to the Composer of percussion music; he explores the academically forbidden “non‑musical” field of sound insofar as is manually possible

emerging audio technologies, such as the phonograph, magnetic tape, microphones and oscillators, were also being explored for their unfamiliar sounds and ‘foreign’ performance techniques. ‘Composers of the musical avant‑garde championed such instruments precisely because of their unique sonic characteristics and their explicit rejection of past musical technique.

As any sound had come to meaningfully contribute to musical experience, then any sounding object could be considered a potential music‑making instrument. Perhaps the need for a line between what is and what is not a musical instrument was firmly broken at the same time as the traditional polarities of noise and music became an artistic continuum. Théberge suggests that ‘an instrument is never really completed at the stage of design and manufacture at all; it is only made “complete” through its use’.9 In experimental improvisation this notion needs to be extended, accommodating temporary or fluid acts of instrumentalizing. The creation of a music‑making tool need not have any intentional design process, or ever reach any sense of an instrument’s ‘completion’. How a performer approaches the practical techniques of ‘playing’ such a loose definition of a musical instrument is addressed in the following sections, beginning with the artistic notion of creative abuse.

As extended techniques become more exaggerated there is a point at which the original intention of the instrument design is forgotten, or is so fractured that it becomes a new sounding object in its own right.

Michael Nyman states that ‘experimental music exploits a [musical] instrument not simply as a means of making sounds in the accepted fashion, but as a total configuration – the difference between “playing the piano” and the “piano as sound source”’

Prévost suggests that the relationship a performer may have with a particular object is akin to traditional instrumental ability, establishing the development of ‘neural pathways in the body (in golfing parlance “muscle memory”). In effect the musician is physically reshaping the body to enable particular actions

Creative abuse: an artistic approach that seeks to exploit a sounding object by any means necessary in order to access its potential sonic palette.
Assessing the artistic and performative potential of a sounding object involves an exploration of its sonic capability combined with the physical possibilities to excite, influence and shape that sonic capability.
Sound Shaping: It is here that the freedom afforded by creative abuse really comes into play, as a performer can explore and exploit any fruitful actions on the object or its available parameter controllers. Examples are presented across three levels of performer interaction: facilitate, influence and impose.
Notion of skill: “There are those for whom it is an activity requiring no instrumental skill, no musical ability and no musical knowledge or experience of any kind, and others who believe it can only be reached by employing a highly sophisticated, personal technique of virtuosic dimensions”.

Théberge suggests that ‘an instrument is never really completed at the stage of design and manufacture at all; it is only made “complete” through its use

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Andy Keep - “Instrumentalizing: Approaches to Improvising with Sounding Objects in Experimental Music” [2009]