The technique of preparing, bowing, scraping and otherwise playing an instrument against its design · the conviction that an instrument's intended sound is one option among many and that the player should seek the sounds the design tries to suppress.
Prepared and extended instrument technique covers the family of methods by which a player makes an instrument do what it was not built to do: placing objects on or between a piano's strings (preparation), bowing or scraping a guitar, over-pressuring a string until it distorts, over-blowing a reed into multiphonics, striking the body rather than the strings, or otherwise drawing from the instrument the sounds its design was meant to suppress. The conviction underneath all of it is that an instrument's intended sound is one option among many, and that the player is free to seek the rest.
The most-cited founding instance is John Cage's prepared piano, in which screws, bolts, rubber and other objects placed on or between the strings turn the piano into a percussion orchestra of buzzes, thuds and altered pitches. Cage's preparation is the clearest single demonstration of the principle: the same instrument, unmodified in its mechanism, made to produce an entirely different palette by a few objects and a willingness to treat the design as a starting point rather than a rule. The twentieth-century avant-garde more broadly · the bowed cymbal, the inside-piano work, the string techniques of the post-war composers · established extended technique as a legitimate vocabulary.
The technique's home within the archive's territory is F·13 Free improvisation, where playing against the instrument's design is close to a default. The European-school improvising tradition treats the guitar, the saxophone, the cello and the rest as sources of sound to be explored at and past their limits, and a great deal of free-improvisation practice is extended technique by another name: the search, in real time, for sounds the instrument was not supposed to make.
Within the archive the clearest practitioner is Keiji Haino, whose guitar is handled less as something to be played than as something to be fought · bowed, scraped, struck, over-driven and pushed into feedback and noise. Haino's fuller instrument list (hurdy-gurdy, flute, percussion, air-synthesiser, and the voice used as an instrument of extremity) is itself an argument for the extended approach: every instrument is approached as a field of available sounds rather than a fixed set of correct ones. KK Null's guitar-and-electronics work runs along the same line.
Extended technique frequently joins the archive's other techniques. The small, strange sounds an extended approach produces are often quiet at source, so the contact microphone is used to capture and magnify them, and the pedal chain to process them further. The bowed guitar fed through a contact pickup and a distortion chain is a single gesture that crosses three of the techniques filed in this subsection, which is a fair illustration of how little the genre's methods respect their own categories.
The technique's position in 2026 is settled: preparation and extension are standard vocabulary across free improvisation and a large part of noise, taught, documented and built upon rather than treated as transgression. The Bureau files the technique because it is the instrumental counterpart to the genre's electronic methods · the way an acoustic or electric instrument, rather than a desk or a pedal, is made to yield the unintended sounds the genre is built from · and because the free-improvisation tradition the archive files at F·13 is largely a tradition of extended technique.
The Bureau holds prepared and extended instrument technique as the instrumental counterpart to the genre's electronic methods, filed under free improvisation. Cage's prepared piano is the founding instance; the European free-improvisation tradition is the home; Haino's fought guitar is the archive's clearest case. The file documents the instrument played against its design.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. Classical Antiquity · last revised c. the Anthropocene