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The Music of the Future

futuresymphony.org

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Re: The Music of the Future

#21

Post by 21 »

beat wrote: post #20
alexssung wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I hope I'm not coming off as dismissive of electronic music in general... just the idea that "computers and synthesizers and sequencers" represent the future of music. They are, at best, merely instruments. If anything, they're pretty strongly wedded to some very narrow musical conventions, such as 12 tone equal temperament and basic time signatures like 4/4 and 3/4. Getting past those limitations is doable, but diff…

When a new popular genre gets invented or grabs the stage, like Trap music in the last couple of years, how do you view that?

It's pretty obvious that it's different from what was there before, so it is an innovation in that sense.

What's the take from "serious listeners" as mentioned in the article, just a mere stylistic change, I'm very curious about this.

Re: The Music of the Future

#22

Post by beat »

rpearl wrote: post #15
beat wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology isn't what makes music modern. The points raised in the article go much, much deeper than that. This makes me think of the composer Conlon Nancarrow, who mostly composed for player piano. He was often credited as being a "father of electronic music", which baffled him. As far as he was concerned, he'd never composed a single note for an electronic music. But his music was the earliest attempt at seriously…

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 t…

Oh, if you have good examples of modern electronic music that's really experimental, please share! I try to keep my ears open to new things.

That said, I've used the tools of electronic music. I've composed with sequences and samples. I find physical instruments to be more directly expressive (I play guitar and drums myself, but I get the same vibe from keyboard, horn, and string players).

More importantly, though, I find restriction to be essential to playing interesting music. The more "unrestricted" the instrument, the more problematic it is. As a musician, I often use deliberately-imposed restrictions to narrow my choices and channel myself in certain directions. That's especially important in the improvisation world, where you don't have musical conventions to serve as boundaries.

I agree that it's extremely important to understand why musical conventions came to be, and experiment with structures that either generate or break those conventions. The flip side of my own music is playing with folk and "world music" forms. The contemporary music I find most interesting these days is cultural fusion music coming out of Israel, and out of the western Sahara desert. The "desert blues" of the Tuareg and other western Sahara tribes is an incredible reinterpretation of centuries-old tradition with modern instruments (mostly, electric guitar). And in Israel, there are second and third generation Arab Jews discovering the music of their grandparents and filtering it through their own Millennial internet-driven sensibilities. Musicians like Riff Cohen and Yemen Blues just boggle me. So, so cool.

Re: The Music of the Future

#23

Post by jerf »

beat wrote: post #20
alexssung wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I hope I'm not coming off as dismissive of electronic music in general... just the idea that "computers and synthesizers and sequencers" represent the future of music. They are, at best, merely instruments. If anything, they're pretty strongly wedded to some very narrow musical conventions, such as 12 tone equal temperament and basic time signatures like 4/4 and 3/4. Getting past those limitations is doable, but diff…

"If anything, they're pretty strongly wedded to some very narrow musical conventions, such as 12 tone equal temperament and basic time signatures like 4/4 and 3/4. Getting past those limitations is doable, but difficult."

It depends on what you're using. You can get anything from a system that can't be pulled off of 12 tone equal temperament and some conventional time signature all the way up to systems that offer complete and total freedom, up to and including setting the exact values in the .WAV file you generate. I wouldn't say getting past those restrictions are "difficult" necessarily, it's just that by necessity, the more power you take on yourself to define your music, the more work you're going to need to do. By the time you end up with the systems that offer total freedom you have music synthesis systems that look more like programming than musical instruments. But they do exist, and back on the topic of the original article, there's a lot of avant-garde-style work that has been done in them.

When I was going to school and minoring in electric music there was a guy playing with "granular synthesis"; his result sounded like telemetry. I'm not being particularly critical or cruel when I say that... that's seriously what his music sounded like. If you look at how telemetry is generated and compare to how granular synthesis works, it's not hard to see why. Tonality was entirely absent, let alone 12-tone equal temperament.

Re: The Music of the Future

#24

Post by iammyIP »

alexssung wrote: post #11
beat wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology isn't what makes music modern. The points raised in the article go much, much deeper than that. This makes me think of the composer Conlon Nancarrow, who mostly composed for player piano. He was often credited as being a "father of electronic music", which baffled him. As far as he was concerned, he'd never composed a single note for an electronic music. But his music was the earliest attempt at seriously…

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…

Part of the problem is that most electric music comes as a simulated band of robots playing in a virtual space materialised as sound through a loudspeaker. Modern electronic music has more in common with a police siren than music in the cultural sense. 'Music' as a deeply rooted cultural term is quite conservative, probably the most conservative art form there is. Therefore it's primarily bound to 'oldskool' rites, techniques and tools. It's also heavily human-centric (one of the main reasons serial music is not a big hit) and thus demands direct engagement of man as composer, interpret and performer. Serial music shares profound similarities to conceptual machine music as it is composition with strict binary rules, but is still interpreted and performed with traditional instruments. As such it is already quite a borderline concept for the traditional Music world. Now if you want them to talk about softsynths that's of no interest to them at all because it happens on quite a different planet to them, to which i would agree.

Re: The Music of the Future

#25

Post by iammyIP »

21 wrote: post #21
beat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope I'm not coming off as dismissive of electronic music in general... just the idea that "computers and synthesizers and sequencers" represent the future of music. They are, at best, merely instruments. If anything, they're pretty strongly wedded to some very narrow musical conventions, such as 12 tone equal temperament and basic time signatures like 4/4 and 3/4. Getting past those limitations is doable, but diff…

When a new popular genre gets invented or grabs the stage, like Trap music in the last couple of years, how do you view that? It's pretty obvious that it's different from what was there before, so it is an innovation in that sense. What's the take from "serious listeners" as mentioned in the article, just a mere stylistic change, I'm very curious about this.

can you quickly summarise what makes trap trap and what is the special invention here?

Re: The Music of the Future

#26

Post by rudolf0 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #10
roymurdock wrote: post #8

Interesting ideas wrapped up in painfully obfuscated academic references (obviously not intended for this audience). THE FOURTH DEVELOPMENT [of new music], which is in many ways the most interesting, [is] namely the replacement of tones by sounds, and musical by acoustical hearing. Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer and their immediate successors awoke composers and audiences to the many new sounds, some of them produced elect…

Yeah. They've got their very sophisticated musical theory that's tied to their very sophisticated philosophy, and it produces music that is absolute garbage.

I'm not sure exactly what theories they're referring to here, but if you listen to an avant-garde musician like Stockhausen, you can still hear incredibly beautiful melodies and progressions and rhythms. They're just very different from the norm.

Re: The Music of the Future

#28

Post by beat »

21 wrote: post #21
beat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope I'm not coming off as dismissive of electronic music in general... just the idea that "computers and synthesizers and sequencers" represent the future of music. They are, at best, merely instruments. If anything, they're pretty strongly wedded to some very narrow musical conventions, such as 12 tone equal temperament and basic time signatures like 4/4 and 3/4. Getting past those limitations is doable, but diff…

When a new popular genre gets invented or grabs the stage, like Trap music in the last couple of years, how do you view that? It's pretty obvious that it's different from what was there before, so it is an innovation in that sense. What's the take from "serious listeners" as mentioned in the article, just a mere stylistic change, I'm very curious about this.

As a cultural innovation, trap music is cool. But from a musical standpoint, it's not terribly innovative. It's still a lot of mid-tempo 4/4. The underlying dismantling of conventional harmony was done in hip-hop 30 years ago by Dr Dre, Terminator X, and other great innovative DJs of the early hip-hop era.

That said, I think hip-hop is THE driving force behind innovation in pop today. Even country music is now being driven by hip-hop concepts. The beats of trap will be around for a while, but they sure as heck didn't invent 808 kicks or filter sweeps.

And it's important to distinguish between cultural innovations and real, substantial changes here. Disco was a cultural innovation 40 years ago. It's more or less dead now. 45 RPM singles were a real, substantial change.

Re: The Music of the Future

#29

Post by AnimalMuppet »

beat wrote: post #6
empath75 wrote: post #3

No mention of computers or synthesizers or sequencers or modern music technology of any kind, let alone music of the future.

Technology isn't what makes music modern. The points raised in the article go much, much deeper than that. This makes me think of the composer Conlon Nancarrow, who mostly composed for player piano. He was often credited as being a "father of electronic music", which baffled him. As far as he was concerned, he'd never composed a single note for an electronic music. But his music was the earliest attempt at seriously…

> Serialization and 12-tone, for all their shortcomings, represented serious questioning of how notes should be organized at all. I think they failed because they dehumanized, and humanity is at the heart of music.

Beautifully put.

Off topic, but I think the same is true of brutalist architecture.

Re: The Music of the Future

#30

Post by iammyIP »

cousin_it wrote: post #2

I think a lot of art is about charming people with your point of view. A big part of it is moving on from points of view that were charming once, but aren't anymore. A century ago, avant-garde art's point of view was new and exciting, and deserved its time in the sun. But now we know that all those manifestos didn't bear as much fruit as everyone hoped, and the time has come full circle. I don't know what a new and c…

I disagree - instead of calling it 'charming' i would extrapolate it to: 'a lot of art is about sexually rooted behaviour - music is made to find a mate'. I don't think that's true, because, and thats one of the main points here; serial music was never regarded as resembling anything in the vicinity of 'charming'. serial music is more like pandoras box for music, and it happened at the same time as computers where invented, shortly after ww2. And the fruits of serial music are massive, but they all taste bitter.
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