A serious question: What if all the instruments disappeared? If you balk at that, let me assure you, they are evolving so rapidly that you should take this seriously. The instruments could
very well change so much, so quickly, that it would seem like they’d just up and vanished. How, you ask? Glad I have your attention, because this is real, very serious, and happening quicker then most of us realize.
The first major change is obvious and has been going on for some time now, and that of course is the synthesizer. Though some might place this revolution in the 60s, we also might venture that the first instruments were human powered synths. What you may not know about them now is how drastically their analog interfacing has changed.
In 1999 Korg gave us the Kaoss Pad, a nifty little device that was practically unusable save for genius sound effects wizards, such as Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead (circa Kid A). Even now with newer versions, few artists dare to attempt the intrepid X & Y axis touch control in favor of their older instruments. Little did we know, that these were all foreshadowing a new way to create music.
Now, some nostalgia from the mid-90s: When I got my chaos pad back in an old high school band, the thing cost around $300. It was a small box roughly the size of dvd player, but with a glowing neon-orange touch screen. One uses the Kaoss pad like a guitar player does with a foot effects pedal, only with your hands; this made it easiest for keyboard players and DJs to use. I thought then, and still believe today, that it had a practical use for every instrument, even trying to run it through my guitar pedal & work the touch screen with my toes. I even got kicked out of a couple bands for this unorthodox playing style. It was too strange and alienating to most other band members. For the time, I would quietly sit brooding in my room, playing my They Might Be Giants, Radiohead & NIN nodding knowingly.
Fast forward to a wonderful reincarnation of a pretty machine, the Korg MS-10 (20), & on November 2008 its debut on the Nintendo DS as Korg DS-10 Synthesizer. Okay, okay I know what you’re thinking. All that build-up for a video game? That’s silly! Well, let me break down why a little $30 portable game card is more capable then a state of the art analog synth studio and why if you’re a musician that uses synthesizers, this is imperative to your time & money.
In one tiny DS-10 game cartridge you get the equivalent of :
§ 2 analog synthesizer emulators
§ 2 Voltage-controlled Duel-Oscillators (patchable)
o sawtooth, pulse, triangle, & noise waveform
§ 4 part drum machine
§ Full virtual synth analog controls
§ LFO
§ Envelope generator
§ VCO2
§ Chorus, flanger & delay parameters
§ 2 Octave touch keyboard
§ Imitation analog patching (yes, you can literally plug in cords still!)
§ 3 Kaoss pads for each synth part, FULLY customizable
§ 6 track, 16-step Sequencer
§ Note Matrix
§ Sync up to 8 Korg DS-10 over Nintendo wi-fi for orchestration
For those who need it in other terms, monetarily speaking, all of the equipment arranged as bulky analog synthesizers, mixing boards, etc. would easily cost 10s of 1000s of dollars (the 8 Korg DS analog setup costing well over 100k, roughly $1280 with Nintendo DSs). The Korg DS-10 costs less then the cords to hook the Kaoss pad up to your keyboard, let alone a studio’s worth of equipment. If anyone out there wants to add up just how much all that equipment would be, I would love to see it! Its even more to go analog when you consider a lot of the desired synths are now post-modern antiques, a mint condition synthesizer going for sometimes thousands more then its original price, just because it squawks a certain way.
More advanced still, in the underground scene, from homebrew enthusiasts, we get Nitrotracker, capable of most of what the DS-10 is, plus and minus a few features. Nitrotracker’s real advantage is a more technical integration of music sequencing & a sampler that uses the already built in Nintendo microphone. Portable composition is now a real possibility.
But this is still peanuts people. And if you’ve followed me this far, here is the reward: These software applications still utilize a pseudo-analogue setup to translate the sound parameters into graphics. What is odd is just how much of it is all still listing of words on buttons. Korg DS-10 is especially guilty of no creative talent whatsoever when it comes to graphics, yet the utilitarian functionality has to be appreciated. Still, one yearns for an easier to use, perhaps customizable interface. This is where the real madness begins. The artists out there are begging to realize that a music program need not necessarily imitate the analog instrument, that instead sound could be produced from anything.
What is strange is that the gaming industry, as well as the music industry, are both scared to death of this new approach that redefines what an instrument can look like virtually. You’d think they’d embrace it as new possible revenue at the very least. Leave it to amateur programmer students & inspired professors at MIT to hit the next big thing, yet have little to no idea of how to properly produce it. Using the software designing program Scratch, these inspired designers have made several musically driven games that allow things such as rearrangement of the keyboard, or playing a song by bouncing balls. Both, Bouncing Music Balls & Piano Machine are featured demonstrations that come with the free software, which can be openly edited. Essentially, we can now make virtual instruments look however we want them to, even on the amateur programming level. Oddly enough, any programmer could design software like this, but I have yet to come across any others. (Please write me if you find any more.)
We stand at the dawn of a new era in music production & the most state of the art technology we have is innocently in the hands of gamers & children across the globe. The final incredible thing we do to this equation is to reapply the touch screen concept to the new music programming. The Nintendo DS and the IPhone are the most familiar touch based systems & fair well (though both scream for more creativity software apps!). I’d like to introduce you to the classic if you haven’t already used one, and that is the Wacom drawing tablet. If you think you know touch-screen and haven’t used a Wacom, its time for a reality check. The Wacom tablet has more pressure sensitivity then a pencil’s physics allow. That’s right, it’s the most accurate analog to digital pressure sensitivity available & for the time being, mostly only artists use it to draw. Enter the Cintiq series, an actual touch-based high definition screen. No longer do we have to match analog pen and tablet to the screen, for they are one. Somewhere out there, there very well could be at this moment, a genius artist designing his or her own touch-based music application, rearranging new virtual instruments, rendering them anyway they please & then playing a new, unseen, instrument of creative hyperspacial reality.
That’s it, we made it! The hybrid of analog and digital is the touch-screen & its taking over the world! I expect we'll have floating virtual glyphs soon enough. If Guitar Hero or Rock Band is any indication, just imagine how much better it could get. As opposed to matching times to glowing dots, one could be learning the instruments of the future. Instead of learning to play a piano, one could simply load up a software application that produced the right notes on the screen, at the right time, and didn’t even show you the wrong notes, let alone allow you to play them. Of course this makes a lot of the old analog skill useless, but one must wonder just how good a musician raised by software can be. One could take a drum set and scale it to the size of their fingertips, playing songs by taping them out. One could use multiple Wacom pens as drumsticks. A drummer could become a classical violinist simply by making a virtual drum kit that corresponded to the notes, fully customizable. The possibilities are truly endless.
The real question is, in the future, will we be able to tell the difference between video games and instruments?
Posts
As an artist and an occasional musician, I see some very strong parallels between the two even though one is visual and one is auditory.
ReplyDeleteIt's because of this that I believe you will never see the disappearance of analog instruments in the same way you will never see the disappearance of the physical act of panting on canvas with a brush or drawing a line on paper.
Anyone who has ever seen a masterpiece in person can tell you that no photo and ever do it justice. There are subtleties to a brush stroke that can not ever be reproduced mechanically.
In that, the same can be said of musical instruments. There is a reason that people will still play a piano over a keyboard, and anyone who plays can tell you that no matter how expensive the keyboard, it will never sound superior to the real thing.
The reason that both of these hold true is simple, imperfections. A trained eye can easily spot a digital painting just as easy as a trained ear can tell the difference between a drum kit and an electronic one. Hell, even the untrained, if they critically examined both side by side, could tell you there is a difference. They might not know what it is, but they would intuitively know something is different.
The reason is that analog is imperfect, digital is not. When you strum an A minor chord on a guitar there are hundreds of other things that go into the sound which the guitar produces, whether the strings are tuned exactly right and not off 100ths of a step, the wood the guitar is made of, the resonance frequency of the room it is recorded in, or anything else which may influence the sound. A computer will play an A chord, exact and precise. The only mitigating factor will be the quality of the speakers it's played out of.
There is no variety to the sound quality, all cymbal crashes sound exactly the same every time you press the button which hits the ride. Yes one could physically go into the program and vary these things manually to try and mimic the sound of a real drummer, but then the question becomes, "why?".
The amount of time looking to imitate the imperfection found in nature is would be much better spent recording real drum tracks.
I believe that the digital revolutions you are talking about will make creating music and art more accessible, but there is nothing like strumming a note and feeling it resonate through your body, hitting a tom and feeling the stick bounce off, or singing from the bottom of your lungs into a microphone. And these things are really the true pleasure for me and I'm sure many others of playing music.
-Dan Glasl
Totally agree. I must admit, the opener is a bit of a tease. The instruments are disappearing in form alone. I dig what you said cause its basically Stephen King's Opinion on why books will never go extinct. And you bring up a great point about how an instrument "feels." It's a far reach to imagine a touch computer screen replacing a drum head; but soon enough these problems of finding ways to play on the new technology will evolve as strangely, as I suppose, as the first person to make a piano, or string instrument... it must of taken years for cultural understanding, let alone inventing new play styles and better design models to be produced.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the modulation of sound, I must disagree with you, but its only because I've played instruments with more touch sensitivity possible then anything acoustic... all you do is plug in your instrument to the Kaoss Pad or run a virtual instrument through the Wacom, or both, and all the sudden the variety of sounds you can create multiplies by millions. When you draw on the Wacom, its more accurate then a pencil, thus picking, strumming, tapping are ALL picked up with more precision then was ever possible (though, duly noted, with more audible mistakes). I would go so far as to say no keyboard player, at least, should be without one, and personally like these new hybrids (like guitarists attaching the pad to the base of their guitar under the whammy bar).
Hopefully no instruments will go extinct because of hybrid potential. But I could easily see bands getting famous off of instruments they made virtually and then recreated in a new physical form to play live... instruments may become more eye-candy then serious application. All the true artists, I feel, will do both; keep their acoustic skills and transliterate them into digital.