Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: MOTM

I would argue that there are many things that can be done today that couldn’t be done 10 years ago because real-time DSP presents a degree of interactivity that is much more inspiring musically—and just more fun, for lack of a better way of putting it—than non-real-time processing.

But that aside, I understand your point. However, the buying public has repeatedly demonstrated that they’re not actually interested in “the next big thing”. All of the innovative hardware synthesizers in the last 10 or so years that were radical departures from the current market, such as the Wavestation, the Z1, the JD-800, were commercial failures. The buying public wasn’t interested. They prefer sample-playback-based keyboards that make familiar sounds like piano, TR-808 drum sounds, anemic analog synthesizer imitations, etc.

Music software companies are typically very small. They don’t have large budgets for pure research. Thus it is safer from a business standpoint to try to develop and sell something that’s similar to something else which is successful, than to invest a lot of time and effort in developing something radically new which people may not be interested in buying. It’s a sad but true practicality.

Hence the frontier, if there is one, would be found in academia. That’s where FM, granular, waveguide techniques all came from. Since I’m no longer hanging out at a university, I don’t know whether the Computer Music Journal et al is currently giving some indication of future developments.

--Adam

Price is  going down by the minute. New G5 introduced, etc, but I have yet to see anything exiting done today with a computer that couldn't be done 10 years ago (regarding synthesis).
Yes yes, cheaper, more convenient, real-time etc. Oh and graphics.... (don't get me started). But were is the frontier??? All the new pluggins we're seeing today is the harvest of 80s and early 90s research. Granular, convolution wave guide. What happens next? What's the next big thing to happen in synthesis? The next big thing that today can only be done with a week of non real-time compiling? As far as I can see, not a whole lot.

Sorry, just venting my frusration seeing all lap tops running Reason, adding to the growing pile of mediocre synth music.

Tobias