14.0

//Source(s): personal experience// I wanted to drop you a line regarding the obsolescence of music synthesizers and the programs & patches used to control them. Electronic music technology seems to be about five years behind the advances in personal computers. Older equipment is usually kept up, rather than tossed when new models come out of R&D. For example, I have a Roland Juno-106 that is lusted after by techno musicians. It offers a cassette-tape based patch storage system that went out of style with the Commodore Vic-20. Nonetheless, the scythe of obsolescence swings. One technology that is definitely dead is Control-Voltage (CV), an analogue interface for controlling electronic musical instruments and connecting them with CV based sequencers. Basically. these were very, very simple analogue computers that stored a short pattern of notes and durations and looped through them with some programmable variations. The only people doing anything with this technology are analogue enthusiasts, who have to search like skip-tracers for replacement parts when their instruments malfunction. ARP patch matrixes are a little hard to find these days, as I have recently discovered while scanning the [|Analogue Heaven web site]. I can imagine that in a few years, I might have to make calls to electronics warehouses in Osaka to find replacement voice packs for my Roland. The CV technology has been obsolesced by [|MIDI], a data transfer protocol which was invented in 1982 and agreed upon by an industry consortium. MIDI directly interfaced keyboards with computers to create flexible composition systems. Sequencer packages such as Opcode Vision have given birth to the house, techno and ambient scenes, just as QuarkXPress and PageMaker gave birth to desktop publishing. The golden age of MIDI is now over. Extensions to the original MIDI spec, such as MIDI GM and MIDI XG, offer more standardization, but no increased functionality. These extensions are driven by the PC multimedia and gaming industries, not by musicians. The new extensions offer a standard set of instruments and effects, so that MIDI sequences using the MIDI GM instruments will sound the same on different soundcards, synths and voice modules. MIDI is mutating to fit a new niche within multimedia. The problem with MIDI is that its structure (the structure of the protocol itself, its slow data rate and method of encoding musical information) restricts composers and musicians in unmusical ways. Engineering decisions made in the early 1980s cast their shadow on all synthesized music. This often shows up in the wooden, poorly composed 4/4 techno songs that are stock in trade, sounding as if the instruments tried to make the songs up by themselves. Another MIDI restriction is in composing microtonal music. Alternate musical scales are supported by some MIDI musical instruments, but never were implemented in the MIDI specifications. And, in this case, "supported" is a term used most loosely. Music synthesizers have only recently entered the virtual world. As processing power continues to become cheaper, synthesized virtual instruments based on physics-based modeling are taking over. Physics-based synthesized sounds were once possible only with mainframes, but now they can be produced on a $2,000-5,000 top of the line synth. Virtual instruments will soon be available at the $800-1,000 entry level price point. Musicians will want finer control of these virtual instruments than the piano-roll, mod wheel world of MIDI will allow. For example, they will want to do realistic slides, will want to morph from one sound to another. Perhaps they will want a slider that changes the material of the virtual instrument, from wood to brass to quartz crystal. They will not want a lot of 1982-era crap to get in the way. They will want higher data rates, shorter latency times, more modulation sources, variables with 32 bit accuracy, more networking flexibility and fewer glitches. MIDI, along with all the sequences and synthesizer patches written in MIDI, will become dead tech, and dead media, in the not too distant future. This brings up a related dead media issue: various recording studio formats. Sony F1, a digital recording standard that prints two digital audio channels to a VHS tape, has already been obsolesced by DAT. These and other digital formats, with their nonstandard error correction schemes and peculiar ways of striping data onto a tape, will undoubtedly be harder for future generations to decode than any analog recording medium ever used. I can picture sound technicians of the future trying to rebuild a working VHS deck and digital decoder/encoder in order to remaster, say, early Nirvana studio material recorded on ADAT, so that GenXers like me can groove to it in our fifties. And what has become of all the compositions written for the pioneering electronic music systems of the 50's and 60's? My guess is, that if they were not recorded to reel to reel, they are gone for good. Recreating such a performance from a composer's notes, patch diagrams and paper tapes would be a nearly impossible task, even assuming that the system they used to create it is extant and in working order. The ephemerality and fragility of the technology I work with every day has now become frighteningly apparent to me. C. Adam O'Toole: adamo@host.taconic.net
 * Dead medium: Fragile formats in synthetic music**
 * From: adamo@host.taconic.net (Adam O'Toole)**