From Gut to Steel: The Dialectic of Organic and Inorganic Music Technology

When musicologists and historians say that “the ideal of sound has evolved across musical eras,” they imply that there exists a collective intentionality — a cultural noesis — toward which human perception, technology, and art coalesce. This ideal is not a mere stylistic preference; it is an epistemic orientation, a mode of perceiving and valuing the real.

Philosopher of biology Henri Bergson provides a useful framework in his concept of ‘creative evolution’ that helps us understand the vital dynamic compelling musical evolution. He asks us to see in the ‘ideal of sound’ not a static blueprint but a vital tendency—a condensation of the élan vital into a specific form of sensation and cognition. For Bergson, evolution is creative precisely because it invents new modalities of experience, not because it perfects older ones.

“Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division. Each living being cuts into the whole of life according to the direction of its own movement.” (Creative Evolution, Ch. II)

The evolution of the violin’s sound ideal, therefore, is not a march toward perfection but a differentiation of perceptual and technical possibilities — each historical epoch expressing a distinct rhythm of consciousness through its acoustic ideals. The gut-stringed violin embodies a vital resonance with the organic continuity of human breath and muscle; the steel-stringed violin embodies a machinic individuation, a projection of power and technological agency into the sonic world.

II. From Gut to Steel: The Dialectic of Organic and Inorganic Élan

1. The Gut String: Organic Continuity and Embodied Vibration

The gut string, composed of animal intestine, is literally a continuation of the organic world. Its vibrational properties — complex overtones, rapid damping, and warmth of timbre — mirror the heterogeneous temporality of living matter that Bergson describes. Its sound decays, breathes, and fluctuates; it resists mechanical uniformity.

In Bergsonian ontology, the gut string resonates with what he calls duration (durée):

“Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when the self lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.” (Creative Evolution, Ch. I)

Thus, the gut string expresses a continuity of becoming, analogous to the living body’s own temporality. Its sound is not projected toward the distant listener, but immerses the performer and the space, creating an aural field similar to McLuhan’s acoustic space: “a sphere without fixed boundaries.” The “ideal” here is resonance as participation—the sound exists as a living field, not a directed emission.

2. The Steel String: Projection and the Machinic Élan

The introduction of steel strings in the late 19th and 20th centuries marks a decisive ontological shift. Steel strings increase tension, linearize vibration, and extend sustain and projection — they are optimized for energy transmission rather than local resonance. Acoustically, they favor directional radiation patterns (as we discussed in the earlier physics sections) and thus correspond to a visualized, representational notion of space — McLuhan’s “limited container”.

Philosophically, the steel string represents the conversion of living energy (élan vital) into mechanical energy (technological power). It literalizes what Bergson warns of in his later work The Two Sources of Morality and Religion:

“Our intelligence, such as it has been fashioned by evolution, is made to grasp the solid and the inert. Its natural function is the fabrication of tools.”

Here, the “tool” — the violin as mechanical amplifier — replaces the organ as the mediator of sound.

This marks the passage from organic continuity to mechanical projection, a transition parallel to what we’ve called the movement from relational rationality to representational rationality.

III. Subjectivity and the Evolution of the “Ideal”

The “ideal of sound” is not a purely aesthetic abstraction; it arises from the co-evolution of subjectivity and technology.

• In the 17th century, the “ideal” was presence and resonance—sound as participation in a communal and liturgical space.
• By the 19th century, the “ideal” became projection and individuality—sound as a declaration of the self within a large, public hall.
• In the 20th and 21st centuries, with electronic amplification and digital reproduction, the “ideal” becomes control and fidelity—sound as a manipulable signal, a data object.

This evolution reflects Bergson’s central thesis that consciousness and matter co-develop through creative adaptation. Just as life invents organs to serve its tendencies, human culture invents technologies that materialize its perceptual aspirations. The violin’s evolution is thus the externalization of the human sensorium’s evolution.

Machine learning systems like AlphaFold or deep audio recognition architectures (e.g., X-vectors, SincNet) now embody a new phase of this process:

they recognize the identity of sound without representation.

These models learn from the statistical continuity of vibration—a kind of nonconceptual resonance with the real. They parallel the gut string’s logic more than the steel string’s, in that their “understanding” emerges from embedded pattern attunement, not formal deduction.

IV. The Bergsonian Path Forward: Toward a Phenomenology of Sonic Becoming

What Bergson offers us is a metaphysics capable of holding both the organic and the technological without reducing one to the other. He warns that intelligence alone “spatializes time” — converts fluid becoming into rigid geometry — but he also insists that intuition (our participation in duration) can reunite us with the creative flow of life.

In this sense, the ideal of sound is not a destination but a method of perception.

It evolves as our capacity for duration—for immersion in the flux of the real—evolves.

• The gut-string violin participates in the vital flow of becoming.
• The steel-string violin projects a mechanized abstraction of vitality.
• The future violin, perhaps hybridizing natural resonance and computational feedback (like a cybernetic organism), could embody a recursive élan vital: an instrument that learns its own sonorous becoming in dialogue with the player, as machine learning learns its own generative models.

Thus, the “ideal of sound” becomes the field of tension between matter and consciousness — between the living and the technical — through which the human continually redefines what it means to be a being that listens.

V. Integrative Summary

In this frame, the Stradivarian violin stands as the fulcrum between two evolutionary orders:

it is still living matter, yet already shaped by representational rationality. Its perfection lies not in transcending biology, but in embodying the limit where biology becomes technology, where intuition crystallizes into form.

The next great violin, to borrow Bergson’s idiom, will not be an improvement on Stradivari but an unfolding of life’s creative impulse through a new material and epistemological milieu — one where nonrepresentational learning, biological analogy, and phenomenological participation converge.