The State of Music Technology

[X-Trade]

I'm writing here in search of like-minded individuals who feel that the 'big' manufacturers in the music technology have not been doing enough to bring exciting, cutting edge, new and intuitive new technologies to the market.

I personally feel that the pace of development has been much too incremental between products in recent years. Most workstations are still primarily based on S&S (Sampling & Synthesis) and only expand with better 'specs'.

A good example is additive & Fourier synthesis. Very powerful, if it can be harnessed correctly. The most recent hardware example is from the mid 90s!

Even with seemingly 'obvious' developments to existing technology, companies like KORG, Roland, and Yamaha seem slow on the take-up of the benefits of these, still living in the 80s & 90s.

Anyway, I have many ideas on how to produce fresh, new, exciting, innovative, and most importantly still intuitive products (something which KORG seems to be lacking on recently).
If you feel the same and want to work to bring such ideas to market, perhaps we can work together towards a common goal.

I'm not necessarily looking to form an organisation or business at this point. At first we should research and look into feasibility ideas and perhaps prototype software.
There are needs for input in all kinds of fields: software design, hardware & electronic, design & manufacture, and also more business orientated roles.

My personal primary focus would be on hardware products but software should also be a possibility, being of fairly large market importance in this modern world. I'm not just talking about purely synthesis technologies either, but MIDI (or other protocols), sequencing, effects, algorithmic composition (and other realtime transforms), hardware and interfaces, even web technologies, etc. really the technologies covered should be vast.


If you are interested, please PM me here or contact me through the form on my website.

[billbaker]

WTF?

BB

[billbaker]

X-trade,

I think what's missing is the appeal to the monkey brain - the ability to twist a knob and hear a difference.

My recollections of additive synthesis (k1r) are of a complex sound with BAD user interface (tech 'o' the times). And that if I was not happy with the sound I got I was out of luck when it came to changing it.

The monkey understands ADSR and filter and cut-off. Adding or changing a harmonic has... what result? I never had a chance to find out.

I think that is also why we appear to be "stuck" in the early synth era. Because the EASY (low tech) stuff was done first. Early analog was (relatively) easy - VA is not nostalgia so much as recognizing the efficiency and elegance of those early synths.

Formant, additive and other later-day systems have huge potential but are unharnessed as far as HOW to get better sounds - EASILY.

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So...

I think the next-gen advance will be in GUI or performance/programming hardware, especially touch-screen tech. As popular as the multi-screen mini-touch of the Trinity-thru-Kronos has been, I think it'll be i-pad style interface that finally knocks down the barriers and gives us a new way to think about programming... perhaps as morphing colors on a spectrum or a Kaos-style vector, or with tapping, movement memory, and animated control surfaces.

Imagine a combi generator where you're putting in an X-Y-Z vector in a 3 dimensional sound scape where the extremes of the three axes are 6 different sounds. Or where programing might be moving through that same 3D space to or away from parameters like "Bright vs. Dark" "Edge vs. Blunt" and "Smooth vs. Jagged" -- and where these complimentary or competing axial pairs can be chosen from a "Parametrics Library"

The number-crunching can be all but invisible, even inaccessible, and the "monkey" will accept it as OK IF the sound results are semi-predictable and musical.

BB

M-audio/Avid's take has been to actually reduce the number of controllers. I've heard the Viper demos and question whether they could get the same results twice. The sounds are cool, but unless they are repeatable I don't see it catching on outside the studio setting.

The number-crunching can be invisible, even inaccessible, and the "monkey" will accept it as OK IF the sound results are semi-predictable and musical.

[axxim]

WTF?

BB

Well I think we got a spamer here and its time to call the "sharpest" spam cleaner on town