The Medium Is the Instrument: How McLuhan Gave Me a Theory for My Hands
There is a particular kind of epiphany that comes when someone hands you a lens and suddenly everything you have been staring at for months snaps into focus. For me, that moment came through a conversation with Ion Dumitrescu, and the lens was Marshall McLuhan.
Researching the void
I had spent a long time digging through papers, trying to understand what drives improvisation in playing music. I discovered the Field of Musical Improvisation; that’s where the rabbit hole started.
I discovered that improvisation is a complex, non-linear, dynamic system composed of “actants”, both human and non-human. I discovered Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, which led me to focus more on non-human actants and adopt a non-anthropocentric understanding of improvisation. I discovered the concept of intermusicality through David Murray’s Baltic Suite, which sounded very familiar; I was raised with the sampling culture of cloud rap. Then I discovered the concept of the assemblage, based on the framework of Deleuze and Guattari, where the performer is only a node in a co-functioning symbiosis. That’s when I knew I had to stop. It always circles back to Deleuze and Guattari. I’m trying to build a musical instrument. How tf did I end up back to Deleuze and Guattari?
I want to build something
I entered a new type of rabbit hole, going through every project from the MIDI Innovation Awards, but now my search was based on feeling rather than thinking. Morphonium was one of the projects that excited me the most, and I was most curious about Spinitt. I knew I wanted to build that, and I knew I would do it how I envisioned it. When I started designing and researching this gimmick, I suddenly had a lot of ideas, and I knew what I wanted to build.
Ion and the Medium
I wasn’t planning on talking to Horatiu and Ion that evening; I just came to the studio for my weekly drum lesson. Near the end of the lesson, Horatiu came for the practice session they were planning after my lesson. I stayed because I wanted to talk to him and explain my concept before the real interview. I talked about my quirky ideas, and he seemed intrigued. I’m so excited to build the instrument just so he and other artists can play with it.
At some point, Ion also came to the studio, while I didn’t even get a chance to talk to him about my interview plans beforehand. I also showed him my designs and explained my ideas. He was really engaged with the concept; we were talking about physicality in instruments and pushback, and he reflected on McLuhan’s perspective on tactility in interfaces.
McLuhan described something he called the audile-tactile: the mode of perception native to oral cultures, where tactility is not mere touch but an interplay of all the senses. The body as a whole resonates with its environment. Hearing is something you feel as much as process. This was not nostalgia. It was a claim about what the nervous system is capable of when it is not trained out of it.
And then there was the concept of cool media: low-definition, high-participation. The low-resolution television image, McLuhan argued, demands that the viewer actively complete it; sensory closure, he called it. The gap in definition is precisely what draws the body in. Engagement is not incidental; it is structural.
I remember the moment those two ideas merged. I was building an instrument designed to resist, to be deliberately under-specified, to give back less than you put in, and McLuhan had already named the logic behind it. The performer leans into the instrument because the instrument doesn’t resolve on its own. The decay is non-linear, the momentum non-deterministic, and the tension non-quantised. You have to complete it. The body is the other half of the signal chain.
Bridging the Gap
What McLuhan gave me was a way to connect my research on improvisation to the design decisions I was already making instinctively. The form of the instrument determines what mode of engagement it permits. A touchscreen offers glass. You slide across it frictionlessly, and it gives back a perfect, quantised response. There is no resistance, no consequence, no momentum. The body is present in the most minimal possible way. The medium, as McLuhan would say, trains the body into a particular relationship with sound.
An instrument built around pneumatic pressure, cast-iron flywheel inertia, and load cells measuring full-body lean is a different medium entirely. It is cool in the McLuhan sense: under-defined, demanding, and requiring the performer to commit physically to complete the phrase. The sound doesn’t happen to you. You have to make it happen, and the making leaves traces in the body that inform the next gesture before the ear has time to evaluate the last one. That is the improvisation loop I had been reading about, now grounded in a theory of media and sensory form.
Actants and Assemblage
McLuhan’s media theory accounts for what the instrument does to the body, but my question was: what does the instrument do to the performance itself?
Actor-Network Theory gives a useful handle here. In Latour’s framework, an actant is anything that has agency within a system, anything that changes what happens, not just passively receives instructions. The haptic controls are not neutral conduits for the performer’s intent; they resist, distort, introduce latency, and generate unpredictable feedback. They are actants in an assemblage.
So what unfolds in a performance is not a single author executing a composition. It’s this assemblage of actants in dynamic relation: the performer’s body and intention, the physical interface and its resistances, the software mappings that may behave unexpectedly at edge cases, the acoustic output feeding back into the performer’s perception, the room, and the audience. The improvisation is an emergent property of that whole network, not authored by any one part.
Two paths, same logic:
If you accept the instrument as a co-creator, you treat it as a musical partner. You respond to its glitches and unpredictabilities the way a jazz musician responds to another player going off-script. The phrase emerges between you; it is not authored by either actant alone.
If you try to dominate it and fail, the mistakes don’t disappear from the assemblage. A slip, a misfire, a feedback squeal forces adaptation. The performance is now partly authored by the error. You cannot edit it out; it has already shaped the next moment.
Either way, the assemblage is the performance. There is no separation between the “intended” music and the instrument’s contribution. The haptic controls are not a transparent medium for a pre-formed idea; they have their own material logic that pushes back and co-composes. McLuhan tells you what kind of body the instrument makes possible. Assemblage theory tells you what kind of event the body then participates in.
Deleuze and DeLanda’s assemblage theory deepens this further. Where Latour’s ANT traces networks of actors, DeLanda’s reading of Deleuze insists on the emergent and irreducible nature of assemblages: the properties of the whole cannot be derived from its parts in isolation. A performance is not the sum of the performer plus the instrument plus the room; it is a new kind of entity that arises from their interaction, with capacities none of them possesses separately. The flywheel’s inertia, the performer’s muscle memory, the feedback loop: each component has its own tendencies, its own resistances, its own thresholds of change. The musical improvisation that emerges is real in the same way the components are real; it exists at its own level, with its own logic.
What This Changed
It changed what I was designing for.
Before, I was building an instrument that felt right. After, I was building an instrument with a coherent argument: that certain expressive dimensions, effort, commitment, physical consequence, and the irreversible momentum of a spinning mass are only accessible through genuine bodily engagement. That the move toward abstraction, automation, and visual interfaces in music technology is not progress but a specific philosophical choice, one that inhibits as much as it opens.
The Haptic Console is, in that sense, a McLuhan argument made physical. The pneumatic dome requires a palm strike to trigger. The flywheel you spin and then live with. The leaning bar that puts your full body weight in the signal chain. Each of these is a refusal of the frictionless screen and a return to physical interfaces.
Ion handed me that argument. McLuhan put the words to what my hands already knew.
The Haptic Console v1.0 is a custom electronic instrument developed as part of my dissertation research. More on its design and theoretical grounding in the project notes.