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Comment by Will_Parker | Hacker News Reader

> Music is a matter of taste

I'm mostly with you with one exception. If there's one thing that may be objectively evolved, it is the power of the raw human singing voice. With all its expressivity, dynamics, range, colours, individualism, and overtones.

I claim that anyone who studies carefully the pure sound of the voice and what it is capable of will always hear synth vocals as superficial. (I don't care genre, whether it's opera, art song, jazz, blues, hip hop or vocal music from any culture).

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Another class of instruments that has evolved in all of the ways you named is the synthesizer. Certainly vocal performance is a very old tradition but to write off synth vocals as superficial is in my opinion throwing the baby out with the bath water. Sound synthesis has gone from an experimental and avant-garde playground to one of the most expressive and versatile fields of music composition.

Techniques like additive, FM, and physical modeling synthesis have opened up whole new worlds of musical possibilities to explore. The combination of synths with vocals only widens the expressivity, range, color, and ultimately individualism that voice alone can accomplish. For every autotuned vocal track in bad taste there are just as many creative uses of vocoders, talk boxes, filters and samplers that enhance creative expression.

I agree with you both.. and offer as common ground an example of pure vocal bliss, yet in a song enabled by technology:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7OYsGAp_QY

I was sure you were going to link to this:

https://youtu.be/Y6ljFaKRTrI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3WgfOVRr7U

> If I hear one more person who comes up to me and complains about "computer music has no soul" then I will go furious, you know. 'Cause of course the computer is just a tool. And if there is no soul in computer music then it's because nobody put it there and that's not the computer's role. It's the role of the songwriter. He puts down his soul in the song if he wants to. A guitar will never write a song and a computer will never write a song. These are just tools.

-- Björk

I’m a huge fan of both the human voice and of synthesis, to the point where my ideal musical space to play in tries to smear the lines between the two in various ways.

Combining singing with synthesis is where it’s at. If you’re specifically talking about computer-generated vox then I probably agree with you. But there’s a whole range of things that can be had with a mix of singing and synthesis that is wonderful to behold.

The standout track for me is Imogen Heap’s Hide And Seek: https://youtu.be/UYIAfiVGluk She can do this live, solo, because all of the harmonies are generated by her voice synth. And the way it reflects her in-the-moment dynamics cannot be matched by a human chorus even if they sank a hundred hours into synchronizing the performance.

Only tenuously related to your point (which I agree with), but I think we'll have better-than-human deep learning based vocals in less than a decade.

Oh yikes, the ice cream / cheesecake of human emotional expression, this will disturb me.

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