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."

Comments

Helpful Links

[laxian]

This is definitely an area which I have devoted almost too much time to in the past year. Here are some links:

• 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 out ... so put up your own links! :)

A couple of reservations

[sam_handelman]

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.