The Music of the Future

Have you seen recently released software synths? They are much different from traditional analog synths and are capable of way more possibilities of sound. Definitely modern.

I don't get why "traditional" musicians tend to dismiss electronic music. Electronic music is not just dubstep or Eurodance. There are modern genres such as future bass that incorporate more advanced musical composition and implement it with new technologies that many people enjoy.

> It's odd to consider music written like this - where snippets of a piece are written in all sorts of conflicting tempos, and then finally assembled during "editing" into something cohesive (although I guess this is how the Norwegian megapop songwriters kind of do this).

Sample-heavy (hip-hop, house) musical genres have been doing this for a while. They'll take old 90 BPM records, sample em, pitch em/speed em up, or cut samples in such a way that they fit into new time signatures, keys, tempos, etc. The really good producers will take a bunch of samples and mash em up into a new work.

I think a lot of popular art forms have an internal tempo, whether their creators are conscious of structuring the tempo or not. All stories (music, movies, books, plays) have "shapes" [1] which incorporate a component of tempo. It would be interesting to make it explicit though for an art form where language rather than music is the main form of expression. Musicals are a happy medium here, a completely time-based dinner party or play might end up more like Jeopardy and less like free-flowing art.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ

No, there is lots of experimentation in electronic music. "Dubstep" and "Eurodance" are not the only instantiations of electronically composed music.

I'd link you to some but I don't really care about convincing someone with unknown tastes.

Synths and sequences are tools, and are no more limiting than fingers or strings. Throwing away every musical convention might be interesting, but so is experimenting to see why those conventions developed in the first place. What parts of the structure can be removed? When and why?

Computers are generally very unrestrictive--they can be used to put together virtually any sound one can think of, as opposed to physical instruments which have physical limitations (although there are exceptions - the people doing pop music or the boring wub-wub-wub of dubstep or the endless 4/4 oontz of Eurodance have different goals in mind than mere experimentation, and they enforce their restrictions with their tools to help produce their ideas more effectively).

One of the best modern music performances I've ever heard was a live electronic performance where a single tone was generated and then manipulated on the spot beyond recognition. It was complex, dynamic, exciting, and above all, musical - but it worked only because of the availability of electronic musical tools.

How about a super-optimizing hyper-intelligent AI with "hyperspace effectors" from the Culture books? Make it the "Mind" who was shunned as a pervert, because he liked to mess with sentients. We'll call him "MeatFracker." Perhaps a "concert" from MF could be billed as a new kind of experience, where MF scans the brains of the listeners to determine the best sounds to play. What's more, MF could conduct experiments, determine the best phrase out of several, then "rewind" the brains of the audience so that everyone only remembers hearing the best phrase. This process is then iterated over the entire "set" of compositions. The concert would take longer than the audience's subjective experience of the time. However, the audience would likely be left in tears and speechless, saying the experience was timeless and indescribable.

As a meta joke, years later, he could confess to not actually having gone through with the above process, and instead say he used remote brain manipulations equivalent to injecting the audience with LSD while playing Nickleback.

I expect the article doesn't mention them because it views them as a means to an end. Since the article is about high-level philosophical concerns and not the nuts and bolts of how the music is created, talking about compositional/performance tools such as computers and synthesizers would be out of place -- the article is more concerned with the aesthetic goals which these or other tools would be used toward rather than the tools themselves.

Anyway the article does actually mention electronics at least twice, althouh both times mostly in passing:

"I draw your attention to the example we heard yesterday, when Nathan Davies used live filtering to give the effect of resonators, extracting tones from white noise, and turning those tones towards music."

"Joanna Bailie, to take just one example, has used the recorded and digitally processed sounds ..."