Musicians protest the “virtual orchestra. “It produces sounds amazingly similar to orchestral voices. But is it an instrument or merely a fancy mechanical substitute? Musicians who claim to be put out of work by the thing sneeringly call it a machine.” But the device’s inventors call it an instrument, not a substitute for musicians. “You could say that a flute is a machine, because it is a device that must be operated by a person in order to do its job. But we call flutes – and violins and trombones – musical instruments.”