Lutherie of coming and going
Musical instruments in future scenarios: between memory, matter, and transformation
Carlos Traginer and Xia Vélora
In the possible futures of humanity, musical creation may unfold in subterranean, underwater, or extraplanetary environments, in mobile architectures—terrestrial, aquatic, or aerial—and also in virtual environments or metaverses. These are scenarios from which to imagine new forms of relationship between body, matter, and sound, and also from which to make music. It is not so much about the environments themselves, but about the conditions that lead us to inhabit them (exploration, scientific research, technological adaptation, environmental transformations, or new forms of collective life) and to develop within them cultural practices such as music.
Human and non-human performers will build instruments or adapt existing ones wherever they are, engaging with the specific conditions of each environment. We are not only speaking of new spaces, but of new sonic materialities shaped by the characteristics of those spaces.
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This creative practice does not imply a rupture with the familiar. In the same way that knowledge now circulates in the form of digital plans, open files, and shared knowledge, the musical creation of the future will be a practice linked to the environment, in which tradition, innovation, and transformation coexist without rigid hierarchies. Instruments will arise neither solely from context nor exclusively from the past, but from the dynamic encounter between the two, in a continuous process of evolution.
These artefacts will not be merely functional solutions, but experiential territories for thinking and feeling. They will not displace what came before, nor will they depend entirely on what is new: they will inhabit the intersection between cultural heritage and exploration. Each instrument will embody a way of relating to the world and, at the same time, a way of positioning oneself within unknown contexts.
Ecologies of making and caring
In ancestral cosmologies, the luthier acted as a mediator between material and spiritual planes. That image resonates in the possible scenarios we imagine today. The musician-luthier of tomorrow—human, an artificial intelligence, a robot, or collaborative systems—will operate within shared networks as builder, performer, and caretaker. These capacities will not replace one another: they will complement one another.
Future lutherie will necessarily be plural. Human and non-human agents will exchange proposals, refine designs, learn from the environment, and reinterpret materials. To manufacture, maintain, repair, adapt, or transform an instrument will not be merely a technical operation, but a gesture of dialogue and care with matter.
Working with new resources or reinterpreting familiar materials—including the reuse of parts from other objects, displaced from their original function by necessity or by imagination—means recognising that instruments contain superimposed temporal layers in which past, present, and future actively coexist.
Music and instruments of coming and going
Within this collaborative network—human, technological, environmental, and cultural—instruments will emerge that are capable of travelling between contexts without losing their connections. They will be neither replicas of the past nor radical ruptures, but vibratory architectures in which continuity and transformation are intertwined. Like the flamenco forms that travelled between Cádiz and Havana and were transformed without ceasing to be recognisable, the instruments created in future scenarios may return having become something else: familiar and, at the same time, new.
Music may be born in one place, transformed in another, and return enriched, without severing its origins. That circular movement—entering a context, leaving it, and returning transformed into another form—will define the lutherie yet to come. Perhaps then we will understand that the future of music does not consist in choosing between tradition and innovation, but in allowing both to coexist in contexts that demand constant adaptation.
Every authentic creation is a form of coming and going: an echo that we send into the
future so that it may return us, transformed, home.