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Comment by nonbirithm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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