I found this passage in the begining of the manual for a C64 MIDI/CV-gate/trigger box, the "Moog Song Producer." I believe it was written (along with the manual) by Tom Rhea. It deserves to be on the web somewhere, so I'll reproduce it below in all its 40-column glory:
INTRODUCTION & DESIGN PHILOSOPHY The functions and forms of acoustic musical instruments are dictated by the availability of the technologies used to construct them. Gong sounds owe their existence to the metallurgist; clarinet sounds to the woodsmith and machinist. For acoustic instruments, form necessarily follows function, because these instruments are made from physical stuff that must vibrate in order to create a sound. You don't expect to produce gong sounds using a clarinet, or vice versa. The size, shape, and other physical characteristics of the materials used to make an acoustic instrument are determined by the kind of sound we want to make with the instrument. Acoustic instruments are hardware-oriented. When the dominant new technology of the late Nineteenth century, electricity, came to the forefront, and evolved into modern electronics, musical instruments shared the radicalizing influence of these technologies. Both the form and the function of a musical instrument that uses electricity is less dependent on the instrument's hardware. The sound made by such an instrument no longer necessarily depends on the resonance characteristics of the materials used to construct it. Electrical musical instruments have always been oriented more toward software, or "programming," of their constituent elements than their acoustic cousins. Even older vacuum tube instruments had electrical components such as tubes, capacitors, coils, and resistors that could be made to produce many different sounds, without changing the actual physical characteristics of the components. A giant step in the evolution of instruments toward reliance on software rather than hardware was the introduction of voltage control. Bob Moog and Don Buchla are owed a debt of gratitude for pioneering its application to musical instruments. Nowadays, we think nothing of producing both gong-like and clarinet-like sounds using a musical instrument that has a keyboard! Clearly, for electronic musical instruments, form need no longer follow function. The evolution of electronics into computer technology has spawned an even more-potent agent to sever the traditional binding of sound to the material. The computer. The computer is nothing if not programmed, or driven by software. The computer is, at its best, an amplifier of intelligent decisions. That is, it is less important that a computer can MAKE sound, than it is that a computer allows a COLLABORATION between the musician and a technology that amplifies his/her thoughts and musical gestures. This is certainly how we think of the computer-based music system, the Moog Song Producer (TM). The Song Producer is described as a realtime/stepmode hardware/software MIDI/drum/sync color video computer music system. --Tom Rhea