Media Coverage

John Jurgenson's article on Thumtronics in the Wall Street Journal has triggered a very welcome spate of follow-on media coverage, including:

• Dec 7th: A blog posting by the esteemed Richard Florida, in which he writes "wow. I am totally blown away. I am starting in my music, innovation and society project and I can really use [your] help."
• Dec 10th: KXAN TV News, "Austin Man Has His Thumb on Next Great Musical Invention."
• Dec 12th: KZOK Radio, "Jim Plamondon, Inventor of the Thummer" (13 minutes).

Apparently, there's more to come.

The media stories describe the Thummer as "an expressive new musical instrument which is easier to learn," so the core message is getting through OK. That's encouraging.

The strong interest shown by the media in this story tells me two things:

• That the media believes – as NAMM's tri-annual Gallup polls indicate – that consumers are interested in learning to play a musical instrument if it's cheaper and easier. (Else, they wouldn't think that the story was interesting enough to run.)
• That once Thumtronics gets a credible Version 1.0 of the Thummer to market, awareness of it will spread rapidly through free PR and word of mouse.

It's interesting to see the message simplify over time. John's WSJ article was about Jim Plamondon, inventor of the Thummer, which some experts say has better commercial prospects than most new musical interfaces, which have a long history of commercial failure. This complex story has been simplified to “the Thummer could be the next electric guitar.” What’s most interesting is that the simpler version is almost certainly more accurate (albeit less complete) than the complex version. Unlike the various other proposed new musical interfaces of the last century or so, the Thummer has that rare combination of simplicity, power, affordability, and uniqueness that leads products to succeed in any market. So the story really is that “the Thummer could be the next electric guitar.”

It's also interesting to see that none of the media coverage of the Thummer has yet mentioned Dynamic Tonality. I can understand why: Dynamic Tonality is hard to explain, and I can’t yet provide compelling demonstrations. So, at this stage of its development, if I were a reporter, I'd probably ignore Dynamic Tonality, too.

Yet the Thummer’s unique ability to control Dynamic Tonality indicates that the Thummer has the potential to truly revolutionize music, even more so than the electric guitar did. The more accurate comparison is to the piano. The piano added a new degree of expressiveness to keyboards, and its felt-covered hammers (starting in the mid-1800's) dampened the Harmonic Series' high-prime harmonics sufficiently to make 12-tone equal temperament acceptably consonant, thereby enabling a paradigm shift to equal temperament. Equal temperament expanded the framework of tonality by making a slew of notes enharmonically equivalent. This paradigm shift has been so complete that most musicians don't even know what equal temperament is, let alone that there are alternatives to it...or that it has ruined harmony.

The Thummer enables similar leaps in expressiveness and in the expansion of the framework of tonality, while "un-ruining" harmony. It remains to be seen whether these benefits will engender a similar paradigm shift.

Obviously, I'm betting that they will. :-)