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Fungible is the property of an instrument having various parts, or the instrument itself, easily replaceable with another that are indiscernible from the original.
An example is being able to buy a commercial plastic recorder and swapping out any part (or the whole instrument) with the same model and have it function exactly the same. An important conceptual feature of this fungible property is that the original instrument and the replacements are indiscernible from one another. In some cases there is no original.
The use of fungible parts is common with DIY instruments that use common household and hardware store materials such as soda bottles, pvc pipe, cans and lids. Fungible instruments can sometimes be made solely from a set of instructions and assembled from these easily accessible parts. This is a common strategy for instrument builders who want their instrument widely distributed with players who are interested in their instrument. Instruments that employ this strategy shift focus away form the instrument being a important or unique object, and instead are focused on making the sound qualities easily reproducible. This is also a common feature of commercial instruments that are sold as products, mostly for the purposes of making them easily reproducible and makes it so that parts can easily be replaced when broken. Generally this is not the reason for calling an instrument fungible on this wiki. This term is more intended for when an instrument maker makes an instrument that is fungible in a conceptually relevant way.
Examples
The instrument of Dennis Havlena and Nicolas Bras often have fully fungible parts, and are made as simple as possible to allow for others to be able to easily build a copy of their own.
The instruments of Zimoun are an excellent example of a fungible instrument where the use of commercial replication and being fully fungible is conceptually relevant to the work. Though his installations are fine art objects they are made a large swarms of near exact copies, using mostly commercially available materials like cardboard boxes and stepper motors. If any one instrument in a Zimoun installation is replaced with another copy it would be virtually impossible to tell, and in many ways the swarms individual instruments become hard to discern from one another, to the point of being Indiscrete, one could be removed or added and the swarm would still be a swarm.
NOTES
Instruments made with easily replaceable parts or are made out found objects, these are often also Indescrete. There is a heightened importance with the way the instrument is interacted in with instruments of this kind.
