How Japanese technology shaped dance music | Hacker News Reader

How Japanese technology shaped dance music

attackmagazine.com

97 pointstomduncalf70 comments

I've wondered if, when Moore's Law stops applying and new technology now is less revolutionary than new technology in the past, mass revolutions in popular culture will become rarer to see along with it. It seems that a lot of earlier music was a product of the kinds of software/hardware that was available at the time (along with many other factors, of course). When there are more options to produce music than ever in the present, choosing to go back to one of the "old-school" eras becomes a conscious creative choice, instead of a result of hard limitations.

It's kind of like how the jump from DVD to Blu-Ray was more significant than 4K to 8K in my mind.

That's true for a lot more than just music, movies, and games. When technology stales, so do most things that rely on it

Software to the rescue then. Social media was technically possible in the 80s, but only a big hit now, and shaping our culture.

This is already happening on a massive scale in the music industry. The Prophet synthesiser is one prominent example of that, but there's many more. Same goes for guitars and other instruments where modern versions sometimes lose sound characteristics due to material changes.

The most famous is example is Stradivarius I suppose.

There are still new kinds of music created which reflect the contemporary music production software/hardware - look up "deconstructed club" genre as an example. It would be difficult to create this kind of music with 90s tools, since there is less regularity.

Or just look at what contemporary jazz is like this decade. Absolutely whole-hearted embrace of pop and hip hop production techniques, sampling, DAW-dependent live performances, thicc 808s etc.

Live music performance techniques have even to some extent begun to emulate some sounds that are artifacts of digital production like sidechaining.

What's really cool to me is again a lot of this stuff came from music traditions we (tech bros) tend to dismiss (pop, hip hop, even ccm lol) but have become important parts of "serious" music.

For music, synthesis and DSP are basically solved problems. Synthesis won't get more interesting if you throw more cycles at it.

Buyers have mostly rejected more complicated kinds of synthesis - including resynthesis and physical modelling - because they don't understand them.

So we're stuck with expanded virtual versions of the old analog synth/wavetable/FM/sampler and studio rack processor models, but with a slightly wider range of oscillator types like granular, and somewhat content-aware processing.

There are areas on the R&D edge, but they're not about the audio.

Changing the subject - one reason Roland stood out was outstanding industrial design. Many of the synths and drum machines produced during the 80s peak are beautiful objects which combined a friendly, fresh, youthful look with a very clear programming model.

https://happymag.tv/the-roland-jupiter-8-the-fattest-synth-i...

http://www.vintagesynth.com/roland/juno60.php

Yamaha tried to do colour coding with the CS series, but didn't quite get it right. So they made the world's most playable and expressive analog poly (CS80) instead.

They took the design hint with the DX7, but never quite hit the same design sweet spot with subsequent synths. And unlike the Roland designs, the DX7 was insanely difficult to program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_DX7

US synth designers never quite understood colour coding, so the designs were more functional and more expensive, which made them feel more serious, more rock band, less accessible and less fun.

this is a good take. I think about my MC-707 Groovebox I bought last year, and it is nearly just the same as an EMU command station, but with the JV2080 rompler sounds stuffed in it, but now with a interface to record it into my computer. In some cases I have noticed grooveboxes have even worse features.. Sidenote, I always thing about Elektron and how they could make "the ultimate groovebox", but instead they make one for seperate things so you have to buy the drums, the fm synth, the analogue synth, the sampler all seperately

Might want to look into the Deluge. Different brand, I know, but does a lot with a very efficient workflow.

> For music, synthesis and DSP are basically solved problems.

This composer respectfully disagrees. For example, there is a world of synthesis research that Luc Döbereiner has called "non-standard" although I prefer his phrase "compositionally motivated sound synthesis" which is not concerned with the reconstruction of known sounds, but exploring the margins of the possible. I don't see an end for that project in our lifetime.

https://direct.mit.edu/comj/article/35/3/28/94344/Models-of-...

1) Since many of these algorithms need to run on standalone hardware devices, many are still limited in power by their chips (and the economics). Amount of voices, oversampling, amount of presets, sound banks, samples can increase the quality of many devices. And many purely pc based electronic compositions also run into CPU/RAM limitations. Perhaps with endless money you don't run into this too quickly, but allowing more "bedroom producers" more power will surely breed new musical ideas

2) in my opinions there it is hard to overstate how much new inspiration can come from work on new UX/workflow/control ideas. Many of which will come at a cost of more CPU as you move away from 1 to 1 mapping from the DSP algorithms.

> synthesis and DSP are basically solved problems

Nothing is ever a solved problem.

I believe that there is a lot of innovation headroom left in music technology. As another poster has said, availability of more cycles has long stopped being a factor. But self-stabilizing effects in UI language (you are good at what you know/you learn more about what you are good at) have started kicking in even earlier, see synth emulations. Those self-stabilizing effects are strong and they make it very hard for new approaches to take foot. But that also means that there is still a lot of space left unexplored, or traveled by explorers who never made it back (read: dabbled with a technological approach but never brought it to musical success).

I agree about UIs being a limiting factor. A great example is the ADSR envelope. Many sonic variations are reached through e.g. replacing the exponential curve. And of course some synths do this, but the UIs are not standard and require numerous additional controls.

Perhaps the next generation will group more variations under standard names rather than offer orthogonal access to every mathematical element. To an extent this is what sound modules do versus analog modulars... but sound modules overshoot by providing very high level sounds difficult to modify...

That's on the synthesis level. I believe that the method/skill lockin is even stronger on the notation level: there are many different ways to create note sequence, from banging keys on a keyboard at the right time, to paper notation, to piano roll editors, to the endless hex grids if trackers to step sequencer hardware that somehow, despite everything you'd expect from their simplicity, can become amazing outlets of creativity. There's endless untapped opportunity in that space, and exploration is extremely rare because the method you know is always better than the method you don't know.

I believe a lot in this. It's logarithmic.

Not having a land line phone -> having one: life changing.

Having 3 land lines in your house -> slightly more comfy

Same goes for smartphones, and others

In a more general sense, this idea is called technological determinism. But Moore's law is only one axis; a new technology isn't necessarily computationally more expensive or dense, and "old-school" isn't necessarily the opposite of "computationally intensive" or anything related to Moore's law. To me it's kind of like expecting cultural reversion because wheels aren't getting any bigger.

Not just dance music but hip hop too! The Akai MPC has been a dominant sampling and sequencing tool of some of the most prolific producers, even as software started to eat the electronic music world.

Heck yeah, and don't forget about the Roland Dr. Sample line!

It should be understood that the MPC is actually a Japanese clone of an American invention, the LinnDrum MidiStudio.

Roger Linn kicked off the innovation around the sampling/sequencing revolution - Akai just made it affordable.

Disclaimer: have worked in the digital musical instrument market for decades, including for Yamaha and other (German) major players in this space. This industry is incestuous in many ways - but it follows the 'musicians rule', which is 'its okay to copy each others riffs as long as it improves the groove' ..

Cool, I did not know this! I have a Linn Majik at home, and really like this amplifier, and the brand.

fit2rule: you seem to have gotten yourself shadowbanned, apparently starting with this innocuous comment 43 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26697170

I think you can email the moderators to get you account restored.

Points of order.

1. The LinnDrum MidiStudio was never a product. The two appear to be similar but it'd be hard to claim one was a clone of the other. They seemingly differ in polyphony, sample resolution, and a wide variety of other features. Indeed the MidiStudio has more in common with the 9000 I would think. Does this make it a "clone" of the 9000?

2. Linn developed both the LinnDrum MidiStudio and the MPC60. Just because he was working with Akai does not make this a "Japanese clone" of one of his designs.

I think the main thing about the japanese instruments were the lower prices. There was plenty of great products from E-mu, Ensoniq, Oberheim, Linn, Moog, and Sequential in the 80's. But they were pricier, which lead to lower market share, which meant worse economy of scale - a classic death spiral. Out of desperation, quality begins to suffer and then it was pretty much over for all of them in the early to mid 90's.

Perhaps I skimmed too fast, but the key "event" it doesn't mention is that much of the first wave of gear was not intended to for "dance music." It was intended for rock & roll. But that market shunned it.

It wasn't until some "crazy kids" said "What's this stuff? What can we do with it?" that modern "dance music" was born.

I suppose you can liken it to the invention of the urethane wheels for skateboarding. You want inspiration for innovation? What the "Dogtown and Z-Boys" documentary.

There's definitely a bit of a pattern to this in music as with nearly everything.

Players within the established tradition "take it seriously" which is on one hand respect for tradition and on the other impedes full integration of new techniques and sounds.

Newer less established genres are more playful/experimental, and what works for them can eventually get accepted by the older forms and rolled in.

I kinda mentioned this in another comment in here but it's very visible in the relationships between jazz and hip hop right now. Contemporary jazz uses a lot of techniques and sound profiles that were developed in trap music of all things.

Whenever I think of the beginning of Japan's rule, I think of the 1977 US$4800 (twice as much in the UK). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_MC-8_Microcomposer. This is two years after the Pop Electronics article on the Altair.

Ralph Dyck-inspired, [1] with an 8080A micro, starting with 4K (1100 notes) of expensive RAM (later 16K). 22 quarter-inch jacks, 30 push-buttons, LEDs.... An inch-thick manual. This wasn't just an improvement on anything that existed. It was a Kakehashi moonshot - wine and roses. Only 300 made.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20110918103549/http://www.soundo...

[1] https://rolandmc8.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/exclusive-intervi...

While the Japanese are amazing at hardware, they seem totally incapable of building world class software.

No notable audio production software or soft synth plugins is Japanese, which is weird, considering that many of their synths are digital in nature (thus contain basically a soft-synth).

Same thing in cameras, Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Sony built amazing camera yet the camera software is basically stuck in the 90s, not to mention stuff like Instagram...

Same thing in cameras, Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Sony built amazing camera yet the camera software is basically stuck in the 90s

Traditionally in Japan, you would, for example, simply print straight from the camera to the printer. You can see all the support for this if you look in your camera's settings. Putting a PC in the middle is more of a Western style of working. The PC software is bad because the people who write it don't use it themselves and don't really see why anyone would want to, when they could simply skip that step altogether.

By camera software I actually meant the stuff running on the actual camera (firmware if you wish).

Where is my upload to Instagram feature for example? Why didn't they add this if they want to avoid needing a PC?

>> "No notable audio production software or soft synth plugins is Japanese, which is weird, considering that many of their synths are digital in nature (thus contain basically a soft-synth)."

Synth1 is well-known in electronic music.

>> "Same thing in cameras, Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Sony built amazing camera yet the camera software is basically stuck in the 90s, not to mention stuff like Instagram..."

I aim the camera. I press the button. It puts the resulting readings from the sensor in a raw file on the SD card. This has worked without fail for thousands of pictures. The rare times I need to use anything I can't get to with a physical button, they're all easily accessed on a single screen by touch with the i button. What else do I need? They keep piling connectivity junk on, but airplane mode shuts it down.

The things new iPhones do with software and camera is both absolutely revolutionary and completely unheard of in the world of big cameras.

My point was the in-camera software doesn't matter for my use case as long as it stays out of the way. The person I replied to didn't specify what kind of camera. The brands in the list implied non-phone cameras to me.

The point is, there is a LOT more the software can do for you than "stay out of the way". The software can do massive things for your image quality and assisting you in bad conditions. But big cameras do not even try.

I don't want them to try. I don't care if the features are there as long as I can turn them off, but I don't want it. The things I can do off-camera will always be far ahead of whatever's inside.

Capture One/Lightroom and Affinity Photo/Photoshop will have those features with higher quality long before they reach non-phone cameras. They work with the raw data right off the sensor. Nothing done with the limited power of an on-board processor will beat a good raw processor in pulling a good photo out of subpar conditions.

You absolutely can not do the kinds of things the iPhone does off-camera.

The iPhone can do three-second exposures free-handed, and have them come out pretty sharp without even trying to hold the phone still. That is not something you do in postprocessing.

I can absolutely do three-second exposures free-handed. It takes a lot of practice and isn't very consistent. But why in the world would I do that? I can get as much light in one as an iPhone can fake in three, and I can always get a pocket tripod or monopod if I really need three seconds. You're inventing problems with better cameras to make the things you have to do to overcome the limitations of a smaller sensor sound impressive.

That's really the point. If all I had was a phone camera, I would be glad for all this software support. For all the times I have my DSLR, the 10x bigger sensor obviates the need for all of that.

It takes zero practice or effort on an iPhone. You don't even have to hold the phone particularly still.

Like, you're literally describing all the extra effort and gear you have to have to do this on your camera. Wouldn't it be better if you just... didn't need any of that?

You seem to be under the impression the only thing people care about with "big cameras" is image quality. Yes, it would be great if I could do everything with an iPhone, but until it has the same ecosystem of add-ons and tools, it just isn't going to work. I've only mentioned image quality because that was the focus of the thread, but that isn't everything.

I've seen some of the absurd lengths people go attaching things to their iPhones just to reach parity with an entry-level DSLR and a few attachments that cost less than the iPhone rig with the cost of the camera included. I looked into the lenses on the 12. The longest is a 35mm equivalent of 85mm. I would need a grip add-on and a lens clip with no image stabilization just to approach the stability and reach of my 70-300mm lens on an APS-C sensor. That's just for wildlife photography, and not even the longest lens. Most serious wildlife photographers go for a full frame and 600+mm primes. And that's just one use case served by the photography platform that "big cameras" are.

You don't know what you don't know and it shows.

You seem to be thinking that I am arguing that you should use an iPhone instead of a DSLR. Not sure where you are getting this idea from.

The argument is that DSLR software is lagging far behind what an iPhone can do. The point is that DSLR software needs to improve, not that you should use an iPhone.

Again: it doesn't matter how much the on-board software improves. It will always lag behind desktop software that's not power constrained. I have the screen on maybe 30 seconds for every 200 photos for checking exposure and using the very well-designed settings screen. Why would I want to use battery draining software that will never match what I can do once I offload photos to a real computer?

Because, again, the kinds of feature I talk about can not be done in software on your desktop. They need to run in realtime on the camera, interacting with its image sensor and other sensors.

Worth 1k words: Electronic video stabilization on Foxconn/Sharp Aquos R6 smartphone[1]

1: https://twitter.com/sm_hn/status/1394210048318971908

Maybe on an oldies like Nikon F6 with 35mm but not like D6 with 85mm, worst case the twitch from clicky shutter button on low end mirrorless are enough to shake resulting picture, you just don't notice at low(in relative terms) resolution

Meh. It's just lipstick on the pig of a tiny lens.

Until said tiny lenses start demolishing the market is the bigger lenses. Thus the death of the low end and mid end cameras.

It's not really about the lens. Phones already have solid quality lenses. The sensor is what matters. Nothing you can do with the product of a small sensor will beat the worst you get from even an APS-C sensor. ML can make guesses about what the tiny sensor can't capture. A big sensor just captures it.

It is far more than that. It is getting amazing results out of that tiny lens.

Why would you not want the same to be applied to a bigger lens?

What's so great about what the iphone camera does specifically?

The night mode especially is beyond anything seen in a full-size camera. It can take fairly sharp three-second exposures free-handed.

OK, but it's worth noting that a full-size camera wouldn't need to take a three-second exposure though.

I would like to see a full-size camera with some extra smarts though.

It would, in the middle of the night. The lens on an iPhone is not slow compared to your average lens.

The lens doesn't matter nearly as much as the sensor. A wider aperture on something that collects 1/10 the light isn't going to match a DSLR. Even the slow 3.5 maximum lenses that come with most DSLRs will beat the 1.8 on an iPhone just because the sensor is 10x bigger.

None of that matters to the basic argument that DSLR software is primitive, and could be lots better, as the iPhone shows, by producing impressive results with vastly inferior hardware.

I think you imagine a usage for DSLRs that's vastly different from reality. I could and often do fill an SD card without ever interacting with the software on the camera. This will continue to be the case unless something major changes to flip the balance between what's possible on a tiny battery and what's possible with 6 cores, a wide range of software that can do anything the iPhone does, and an essentially limitless supply of power.

Even the stuff on there already uses too much power. Nikon's SnapBridge uses BLE and still cuts how many photos I get on a charge by 90%. That's without spending any time doing anything in the camera's software. I turned it off so I didn't have to charge the battery after going out for a walk with the camera. And you think I want to do more on that battery?

You do not "interact" with the software on the iPhone either to use this feature.

Take a RAW image with your phone, take a JPEG of the same scene, and then compare.

If the scene is challenging at all, the JPEG may look fine, but the RAW will look like it came out of a 1990s webcam. No dynamic range. Fuzzy focus. Harsh/blown out highlights and muddy shadows.

There is astounding computational sorcery that smartphones use to make that tiny dot of a lens and sensor produce acceptable photos and videos.

Did you know: lots of mirrorless cameras already runs Linux anyway.

Can you expand on this a bit? Your point isn't clear.

> While the Japanese are amazing at hardware

You're listing hardware companies though, we'd have to look at Japanese software companies to see. Now I agree Sony and others struggled to absorb software and considering they were very high grade hardware device manufacturers the delta was damning. It's a different approach I guess

What about Korg software?

While I'm not sure what country they develop their software in, the company is Japanese.

^ KORG's software is fantastic. Killer apps for the iPad as far as I'm concerned. Gadget is one of my favorite DAWs.

NalNezumi 6 days ago [–]

While establishing a "cause & effect" here seems very hard, from my personal experience working in software field in Japan, I think the winning concept here is actually the combination of removing middleman and paying good salaries. Japan is very very behind in IT/digitalization compared to most western countries. This doesn't just mean it's behind in product portfolio and quality, but that perception of software engineer & managers and still quite behind. The respect that a lot of software engineers enjoys in US/EU is not quite there yet in Japan(and salary often reflect this).

The C-suite usually doesn't have a firm understanding of software/IT world, and instead ends-up hiring a lot of "Scrum-experts/Agile coaches" and hires software engineers from consultancy or recruitment companies for cheap. There's ofc companies that doesn't fall in this category, but for middle-sized companies in Japan (which is the bulk of the economy), this is the true state of things. Middle-men in Japan have therefore been way more encroaching on this, and they have the incentive to not improve the respect/social standing the software engineers have.

"Removing managers" in this article does not mean the same thing as it would in US/EU, conditions are different.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27178486

They produce world class video games though.

Well, I personally got a whole lot of production work done in the 00s with Sony Vegas... so there's at least one counter example.

I think Sony also published ACID Pro for a while.

Same in the 3D world, and video production. I can't think of 1 Japanese software product.

> No notable audio production software or soft synth plugins is Japanese, which is weird, considering that many of their synths are digital in nature

Have you tried KORG Gadget? It's incredible and a solid DAW/virtual studio in its own right. Basically a killer app for the iPad, and it's also available for macOS.

All of KORG's music apps are fantastic, and basically reason enough to buy an iPad: Gadget, Module, ODYSSEi, iWavestation, iPolySix, iMS-20, iMono/Poly, iElectribe (and its Wave and Gorillaz variants), iKaossilator and iM1.

In addition to PC/Mac/iOS, KORG also has even ported several of its music apps to the Nintendo Switch and 3DS/DS. Definitely fun to make music on a gaming handheld.

KORG is one of my favorite music software/virtual instrument/plugin developers, hands down. And they've been on fire in terms of hardware synths over the past few years as well, both with new/affordable analog as well as classic reissues.

Definitely incredibly influential, but I would say that Roland, KORG, Yamaha, etc. are matched by the likes of Moog, Sequential, Oberheim, Access, and many others (from E-mu to Linn to modern Eurorack) on the hardware side, and on the software side by DAWs such as Reason, Live, FL Studio, Logic and myriad plugins. Definitely a fair amount of US and Europe as well as Japan.

This headline is the antithesis of the "That's going to be short article" joke.

Relevant video: "Breakbeat Deconstruction: From hip hop to drum & bass and beyond"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJf9Jptq7VY

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