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Musical Machines Gain Recognition
vena writes "CNN has an insightful article on the increased role of computers in the production of music. While Musikmesse, the world's largest musical instrument show, rapidly increases their support of the computer as a musical instrument, there are still limitations to the power and ability of software synthesizers. However, the ability of a computer to make the everyman a musician could herald a coming age of increased play and experimentation in music. Software such as Reason by Propellerheads Software brings unprecidented power to the hobby musician, and the presence of laptops as part of a live band's performance is becoming commonplace. The days of playing to your sequences off a DAT tape may be numbered, as musicians gain more control of their digital music in a live setting with the aid of new, powerful software and portable computers."
If you're talking about all in one solutions, I would think that highly-programmable software such as pure data, being free and fairly (?) open would top the list, along with less open, but also powerful, packages like MAX/MSP. And if you're talking about Reason, I would think that all-in-one (cheap) packages such asOrion would deserve a mention.
I don't really use (beyo0nd experimentation) any of that software, though - sticking to my own buggy stuff and my hardware synths - so I'm no expert - but next time I update my own (very limited and crash-prone) software synth, it will certainly be a DirectX instrument and maybe a pure data object.
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If you don't have the $10k to set up a Pro Tools studio, check out Buzz at www.buzzmachines.com. You can set up virtual versions of your instruments and run them through effects, etc, then run all those into the master. It's very intuitive, give it a try.
- http://www.kvr-vst.com - My favorite VST (softsynth and effect plugin) news and discussion site.
- http://www.em411.com - Another computer music news site.
- http://www.computermusic.co.uk/ - Lovely Computer Music magazine
- http://www.steinberg.net - Steinberg, makers of "Cubase"
... a software sequencer, music work environment and more.
- http://www.emagic.de - Makers of "Logic". A lot like Cubase. Sequencer holy warrior fanatics will track me down and rip me apart for mentioning Cubase first.
- http://www.cycling74.com/ - Makers of sound programming thingies Max/MSP and Pluggo. Pretty complicated, but reportedly worthwhile.
- http://microsound.org/ - Home of arguably the most snobbiest "experimental music" and computer music mailing list on the net. Plenty of interesting stuff here too. Prepare to listen to various 30 minute plus "masterpieces" of quiet shuffling sounds, only.
- http://www.nativeinstruments.de/index.php?home_us - (English Link) Stylish softsynth and plugin rockstar company. They make some incredible products. Geeks will have hard-ons for Reaktor.
- http://www.refx.net - Maker of interesting VST plugins, notably "QuadraSID" which is a sound plugin based on the Commodore 64's famous, classic "SID" chip.
I'm sure I left plenty of stuff outour written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
When I was a kid, I used to play around with Concertware a lot - it was (as far as I know) the first software that let someone with only the most minimal knowledge of music write something down and hear what it sounded like. This is really neat, I'll grant, and I happily churned out hours and hours of bad chamber music.
However, after I started really playing with other people (band in school doesn't count) I concluded that computers were not really capable of producing music on their own. The computer plays whatever you type in perfectly, which is not what you want. The other musicians, if they're any good, adapt to what you play (this is particularly true of more improvised sorts of music, of course) which is a very "resource intensive" (in terms of your nervous system) proposition. Even if the players are producing exactly what the composer tells them, they're providing subtle variations in the sound (I don't want to mire myself in music-speak) that Concertware's great-grandchildren still cannot duplicate, at least that I've ever heard (although, to be fair, they can do a lot better than concertware.)
This is one of the reasons I don't like most electronic music - you can take a recording of tuvan chanting and sing/play along with it, remix it, what have you, but the technology does not successfully duplicate what the monks would do if they were in the room playing with you. When and if it can, I'll call whatever device an AI.
I suppose the people who actually operate cameras and draw cartoons have the same reservations about CG. As much as they I may love computer assisted editing (which is what most of the toys in the article are about), truely computer generated music still sounds like the stuff that plonked out of my Mac SE30.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
- The days of playing sequences off a DAT are not numbered -- they're already long gone. Laptops have been used as sequencers to drive outboard MIDI gear for almost as long as there have been laptops (for me it started in 1992 with an Atari STacy). The new development, as mentioned in the CNN article, is using software synths (usually VSTi's) as live performance tools.
- I disagree that there are "limitations to the power and ability of software synthesizers". By example, I offer Absynth from Native Instruments. From the 68-stage envelopes(!) to the wave fractalization and spectral editing tools, this offers sound shaping tools that no hardware synth can compete with.
- Up until recently, you could argue that the latency problem with software synths kept them second-class citizens behind hardware boxes -- you'd hit a key and get your note a split-second later. This final limitation has been defeated with the advent of faster computers and cheap professional audio hardware. I use a 1.2 GHz computer and a $300 Emagic EMI audio interface, and my softsynth latency is about 2.5ms. Not perfect, but it actually beats some of my hardware synths. (Hit a fat chord with layered patches on an Emu Morpheus sometime and you'll see what I mean -- you get a flam, not a unison attack.) And when you play back sequenced software instruments, they're sample-accurate.
So the story is not laptops on stage, or computers making everyone a musician (if you can't write songs, the computer will not help you), but rather, software synths coming into their own as valid replacements for hardware on stage and in the studio.I'm surprised this one hasn't been mentioned yet(heck, its worthy of a front page story)...
But what about The Creativity Machine? From the article:
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/