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Comment by ogou | Hacker News Reader

I'm a fan of his music and respect his aesthetics. But, these are not musical instruments. They are mostly MIDI controllers. They don't actually generate sound with mechanical means. They are theater props.

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I don’t agree that they’re just props: they’re analog controllers and so the form factor and manner of their use directly affects the music being played. Even the controllers that are just “big heavy knobs on bearings” are fundamentally different to a typical knob on a synthesiser in terms of the signal they produce and the sound that ends up being made.

In that case, these are quite literally the droids you're looking for:

- https://capturedbyrobots.com/

- https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19242-squarepusher-z-ma...

- https://www.patmetheny.com/orchestrioninfo/

I don’t see how the fact that they make sound digitally in any way makes them less of an instrument. MIDI controllers are instruments- and incredibly flexible ones with almost limitless sound possibilities at that.

I have several midi controllers. They are not instruments. I have many instruments (including vst's) that have controllers on them. Apart from my old rackmount Korg Wavestation a/d I have several instruments without controllers.

The old concept of an instrument does not map well to electronic music equipment- perhaps it would make sense to say that the combination of the input device that interacts with your body, and the computer or synthesizer are together a single instrument? In the same way that all of the different parts of a guitar are one instrument.

Also there's no planet where his music is "industrial metal". Could see him getting lumped in with the Power Electronics genre though.

From his own Bandcamp page: "Author & Punisher is an industrial doom and drone metal, one man band". Every review I could find describes the music as "industrial metal". Maybe your definition is off?

I agree it's not metal, but it's definitely industrial. I'd call it power noise or electro-indstrial. Metal usually means guitars, not synths to me- however the sub-generes of industrial are confusing and mixed up. They're mostly whatever a band wants to call themselves, and most of them make music that fits into all of them.

I'm on board with distinguishing between separable controllers and integrated instruments, but...

> They are theater props.

Is the manual of a pipe organ a theatre prop?

Only modern ones. Older consoles are literally hard-wired (or -tubed in case of pneumatic designs) to the valves in the wind chests.

Labeling midi controllers as theater props is an insane take. Midi controllers are essentially programmable instruments.

A controller is not the same as an instrument, it generates a control signal that can be used to control the actual instruments (synthesizers, drum machines or a well hidden laptop). And I have built both controllers and instruments and have written a MIDI implementation so I got a bit of an idea about those things.

And if you tell me a mechanical engineer made his own instruments for his good sounding one-man music act the most boring, least exciting, least innovative outcome would be him adding some knobs and buttons into a cool looking enclosure. If that enclosure would look less cool he could very likely still make the same well sounding music, meaning it is not essential to the sound, meaning it could be seen as a prop.

I don't argue this is verboten, it is just a bit disapointing that is all.

would this qualify? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJiKvzRGMkU

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