expression. The direct connection of an acoustic instrument’s control device to timbral control and the performer’s body, far from being a limitation, enhanced communication. The physical limits of performance and instruments expressed innately human and natural limitations. The recognition of a player’s efforts is then a significant part of appreciating traditional music (Mulder 1996).

The most successful instrument of the analogue era, the electric guitar, amplified and extended these principles by making the human body central to performance control. For example, by the proximity of the player to the speakers as a way of controlling feedback levels, used in combination with effects and traditional performance control.

In this light, the development of new music styles within the digital medium is simultaneously a technical and artistic problem. This becomes increasingly apparent where excessive innovation has led to the discontinuity of musical communication through the dominance of formalism over physical gesture and metaphor as language. The development of production skills based on existing styles and equipment presents half an antidote, because these skills are often embedded in language that is partly redundant artistically.

Through an amalgamation of the familiar and novel, forms of neo-world music based in the digital realm have and continue to explore the range of possibilities for building on the continuity of the past. Yet artistic solutions have not kept pace with the rapidity of technological invention. As the application of digital technology increasingly blurs the distinction between music for performance and music for reproduction, an extension of the acoustic and analogue aesthetics through the flexibility of digital technology may allow for the best of all media, and provide more stable artistic solutions.

This is why physical modelling synthesis coupled with appropriate trigger models such as wind controllers holds the greatest promise for the digital music idiom by making musicianship central. Moving to a physical model based rather than recording based paradigm (Takala et al 1996) of music production allows for the evolution of music instruments from their natural form based in sound archetypes to a virtual world (Smith 1996). Instrumental evolution is then possible through the creation of new instrumental sounds and gestures in combination with effects and performance algorithms, yet still being based in significant points of sonic and gestural familiarity. The use of synthetic or cross cultural scales, gestures and rhythms then affords this new idiom a voice, as the dialectic between the blues and guitar this century historically demonstrates. As reactionary as this approach may seem, allowing the evolution of message through extending traditional musicianship rather than adding complexity to negate it may prove to be the far more radical step.