As a piece of technology, the modern symphony orchestra is an engineering marvel, a project underway now for more than four centuries that has flourished through countless software updates and component upgrades to its user manuals and core instrumentation. The orchestra has been shaped and defined and redefined again and again not only by those who work on and operate it, but also by the evolution of its underlying technologies and by the social and cultural traditions in which it operates. The orchestra is, in short, an exquisitely balanced synthesis of people, technology, and culture with all of its swirling forces and alchemical interactions. It is perhaps the apotheosis of a community engineering culture built around the interaction between human and machine.
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