The great escapes... of the music making process

From the first rhythms of hitting two stones together in a cave to a music workstation packed in our luggage, music and its creative process staged four great escapes from their confines. 

The hugely disruptive inventions, which caused those great escapes, are now taken for granted - because their results changed our world so significantly. 

Arguably, the first musical scales and their reproducible definitions, which were used to tune musical instruments, essentially allowed the creation and playing of music to travel from one person to another. Pythagoras certainly has a big claim in that department, and his scale has shaped even metaphysical musings on music and its significance for several millennia.

However, learning and reproducing music has remained a superbly tedious process. It could take even up to ten years to become an ecclesiastical singer in the early Middle Ages, as the only rudimentary musical notation available to the monks merely captured a vague outline of the musical piece. 

The so-called neumatic notation was merely indicating, for example, whether the melodic line was going up or down. Singers learned compositions by listening to, and repeating, others.

The first truly great escape of music came from the colossal idea of a Benedictine monk in the early 11th century. 

Guido of Arezzo has had the phenomenal idea of working out a musical notation that allowed musicians to reproduce a piece of music on sight. He also invented a method of teaching, and even to the Pope's great surprise, a score could be instantly performed by boys who have never seen or heard the musical piece before.

This was absolutely unheard of until Guido's invention of modern staff notation. A score could be sent to singers somewhere else, and they could instantly reproduce the chant...

More than a thousand years later we take it for granted that someone can produce a score, send it or publish it to others, and it is a truly ordinary concept for us that anybody who understands the notation is able sing or play the composition on sight, anywhere else in the world.

It is somewhat amusing to think that many centuries after Guido, some tried to lock music up behind certain walls. 

The most famous example is that of Allegri's Miserere, which was considered so divine that its score was not allowed to 'escape' the walls of the Vatican... Only three authorised persons were given transcriptions of this indeed sublime work.

Imagine the pleasure that Guido would have felt, if he had seen a young musical genius called Mozart listening to the piece during a visit to Rome, and then transcribing it from memory... 

Thus, Allegri's masterpiece had literally escaped the mighty walls of the Vatican.

Still, music remained an ephemeral wonder. One had to be physically present at a performance, and once having listened to it, one could only rely on one's memory to evoke the sounds and emotions of the work. 

One may not have had the means to attend performances, and one's access to certain types of music performed in certain settings may have been limited or completely made impossible for one's entire life.

Thomas Edison's humble wax cylinder has changed everything in 1877. 

True, it was shockingly rudimentary by today's standards, but suddenly, any musical performance could be recorded and reproduced elsewhere, any number of times, by practically anybody.

For us, it seems absolutely banal that ephemeral musical performances could be preserved for posterity - or that one could repeatedly listen to performances by musicians one could not meet, from venues one could not access.

This initial, and later immensely developed, recording technology allowed radio and all other broadcasts, too in the years and centuries that followed.

It may not seem like an invention that had direct and vast impact on music creation, but... composers were no longer creating pieces of music that were laying around on pages of scores that were only usable by trained musicians, and audible only by people who could attend performances by such musicians. 

Composers could create musical scores that were recorded once in a recording studio, and then their creations could reach millions of people scattered around the globe, who could listen any number of times to their beloved musical favourites. 

This even had impact on the format and content of what they composed, e.g. in popular genres some songs 'had' to fit onto certain mediums in terms of duration.

Dave Smith's & Chet Wood's invention of MIDI in 1981 brought us the next great escape of the music creation process.

Imagine if Bach had had a MIDI keyboard and the means to record MIDI information... His ephemeral (and reportedly stunning) improvisations could have been captured for posterity, and reproduced instantly as if he had been sitting at the keyboard. 

MIDI, or the musical instrument digital interface, became the perhaps most stable standard that could carry not the sound, but information of the actual musical events in a musical performance. 

It encoded, in a form universally understood by any MIDI-capable instrument and software, the musical notes, the way in which they were played expressively by the musicians, and heaps of extra information of that very performance. 

Musical compositions created on digital instruments and computers could be instantly transformed into a musical score, passed to entire orchestras as a finished piece of music noted down in traditional form. Guido would have loved to see this...

We may take it for granted, but for the first time in mankind's history, musical notes and their performance details could be instantly captured, reproduced and developed further, sent to someone else to collaborate on quasi-instantly... The actual musical composition process suddenly escaped any physical confines of locality and time. 

One could return to a complex composition weeks later and continue where one had left off... One could instantly recall elements of a work, could change it, elaborate on it... 

It also brought another type of escape: a break from human limitations. 

Imaginative and revolutionary composers could now develop pieces of music that were literally impossible to perform by humans, no matter how technically gifted they may have been as players. In terms of complexity and tempo, MIDI allowed the creation and reproduction of compositions that could never have been born without it and the instruments that could turn MIDI information into sounds. 

Only a few years later, the next great escape of music creation & production occurred.

The 1980s have brought us the affordable and portable music workstations that eventually made the entire music creation process, from composition to mixing to mastering, fully portable...

Ensoniq and Korg were at the forefront of this revolution, if we don't count the Synclavier in the late 1970s or the Fairlight CMI, which were pricey inventions in their initial incarnations. These were for quite some time confined to high-end studios or were in the hands of established successful musicians who could afford them. Also, in terms of features, they were not yet the end-to-end music production tools that later workstations at a fraction of price have become.

However, workstations like Ensoniq ESQ-1, Korg M1, and their vastly powerful successors have changed everything. With their immense sonic range, on-board effects, MIDI recording and editing, even multi-track digital recording and mastering, allowed one to pack the studio into a bag... and take it anywhere. 

Later the arrival of purely software workstations running on personal computers, especially laptops, truly made the music studio portable. 

Not just the composition, but the entire music production process has become something that one could pack into a bag, travel with, unpack during travel or on arrival, pour the fruits of one's labour into other equipment... or make even a CD master copy without using any other tool. 

Where would the next great escape come from? What could it be?

Perhaps we lose our dependence on the instruments and studio production tools packed into a mighty software or hardware workstation? Maybe the next great escape comes from outside music technology, in the form of wearable and implanted tech... 

We might see the 'escape' of the very early stages of the musical creation process, i.e. turning thoughts directly into compositions that can be downloaded to anything or anyone else, without the reliance of an external musical instrument to first play it on...

We could think up perhaps musical pieces, sounds, soundscapes, directly translate them in our heads into audible and reproducible works, which then can be transferred to others... without having a laptop or a bulky synth workstation carried around with us. 

Whatever it may be as a next disrupting and world-changing step, for now, we can just reminisce on where we ended up since a humble monk in an Italian monastery wanted to write down music that could be instantly understood and reproduced by others...

The haunting of the new

Korg Prologue

The title of a classic Ray Bradbury short story, borrowed here temporarily, describes something that happened at the start of this year, and it shows how increasingly limited number of designers can think in novel ways when it comes to, paradoxically perhaps, re-visiting legacy technology of yesteryear. One manufacturer has proven yet again that when putting the musician at the centre of the design thinking, the result can be again a step evolution with something that nobody ever created in a hardware instrument.

We have seen years of retro synth offerings that were inundating the insatiable current market without offering much that the state-of-the-art technology could add as extras to our (home or other) studios of today.

When there was some innovation, usually, with extremely few exceptions, big and small names alike have come forward with instruments that, at best, had small variations on a theme, or added something that then stopped well short of what it could have become.

As usual, the beginning of the year and the NAMM show was expected to parade, even if in the preliminary states of not quite market-ready teasers, the latest and greatest offerings from music instrument makers.

Perhaps NAMM 2018 was one of the most polarised so far, in terms of the samey, endless variations on previous and current themes vs. the truly innovative ideas in the field of electronic instruments. As the ancient saying goes, light shines brighter in darkness - and this year there was one and only one step evolution that made the absence of innovation in the other products all the more evident.

Once again, countless new analogue variations, new modules, new re-spins (this is no longer a contradiction in terms, in the retro wave...) of the past, recent past and even present.

Innovation does not mean adding some extra polyphony or extra oscillators, an age-old matrix sequencer or whatever long pre-existed component to an existing design. Whatever name may stand behind it, let it be Moog or Dave Smith Instruments or Novation, this is simply a re-iteration (as illustrious as it may be) of existing technology.

Among the manufacturers that in the past months did not just regurgitate old ideas or just put new spin on essentially the same previously marketed instruments, Waldorf did stand out with the flagship Quantum. However, even this is merely bringing hardware instruments in line with software plugins that existed for decades.

Still, finally, a granular synthesis engine integrated with something else inside a tangible instrument... but no step evolution here, nothing that many others have not thought of before in terms of sound generation.

Waldorf Quantum

Going back a little bit, in the slightly less immediate past, Roland has thought of hybrid analogue / digital instruments, and produced a while ago the JD-Xa. However, apart from its frustrating user interface, the most frustrating is the stopping in conceptual thinking half-way through. It is a horrendously limited instrument compared to what the marriage of digital and analogue engines could have been.

Roland JD-Xa

Yamaha has produced the Genos, that in their breathtaking audacity (and by definition shocking  incorrectness) they dared to call a workstation. For many decades, the Korg M1 has defined and back then basically create the category - and even on a superficial scan of the Genos specs, it fails fundamentally and spectacularly.... and it is, at best, a sample-based arranger keyboard on steroids.

Yamaha Genos

Long gone are the days when Roland and Yamaha have produced step evolutions and presented entirely new ideas in usable instruments. Apart from endless re-spins of their glorious past (distant past...), what we see is the same synthesis engines being re-spun endlessly, in the best of cases, with some tweaks and expansions...

Even the Yamaha Montage was merely a beefed-up re-spin of their FM and sample-based AWM2 dual engine synths, with a user interface innovation. The brutal fact is that since FM synthesis (in the era-defining Yamaha DX7) and variphase engines (in the innovative Roland V-Synth), these manufacturers have not produced anything other than gradual increments of pre-existing technologies. Nor have many others...

The only step evolution produced and presented in mature form, winning also the "best in show" award at NAMM 2018, was the Korg Prologue. The major step is not because of them releasing yet another analogue instrument, not even because it is a hybrid digital + analogue synth.

There was a lot of discussion on its modulation capabilities with one LFO... which, incidentally, was also the case of several era-defining analogue instruments of the past... Somehow we have not seen legendary Prophet 5 synths tossed in dustbins by annoyed owners because of their single LFO :)

What those discussions and the subjective debates missed entirely, was what we could witness for the first time ever in a hardware synth... Apart from a hybrid architecture that did not stop half-way through the quest of capitalising on its possibilities (as Roland did with the aforementioned JD-Xa), it introduces user-definable, user-programmable digital oscillators and digital effects (!) in the multi-engine.

The ability to define whatever digital oscillator (also digital effects) with a software development kit (SDK) to be released in April, to have 16 of these user-definable units that operate seamlessly as any pre-defined oscillator in the Prologue synth, well, it is something we see for the first time in a full-fledged non-modular hybrid synth keyboard... and as the cliche goes, possibilities are really endless.

Korg Prologue versions

What it shows again, is that in a landscape dominated by the retro movement, somebody can come up with a brand new idea that instead of repeating the same old concepts, elevates them to entirely new heights.

It showed off the increasingly painful difference between thinking with purely marketing minds (let's re-spin a many decades old engine and violate even consecrated instrument category definitions with a huge price tag, one may guess what keyboard this applies to...) and with musician-oriented engineering minds.

Roland a while ago has introduced the plug-out concept, where essentially a software plugin could be loaded into their System-1 and System-8 keyboards. However, once again it fundamentally limited itself: the plug-outs are only done by the manufacturer, there is no open software development, and the plug-out slots are extremely limited anyway.

It was another example and another frustrating case when one gets close to an idea, completely misses the potential and with a very profit-oriented approach produces an almost-solution that does not have the musician and sound creator at its centre,  instead it firmly keeps the manufacturer's marketing thinking at its centre with an iron grip.

Even in this backward-looking market-driven world, Prologue, with the extremely few exceptions of some smaller manufacturers and some modular offerings, it shows there is hope. It happens to come from one of the big names, but it seems possible to come up with something new. As in the case of Kronos, the superlative workstation, this is again something that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

However, it is also symptomatic how devoid of innovation the entire landscape has become, where a few, increasingly few, new ideas stand out.

As in Ray Bradbury's wonderful tale, the newly (re-)created embodiments of old technology can have, in this case, exciting and entirely novel spirits haunting it in the best possible sense.

It also shows that innovation can be propelled by a user- and musician-centric approach, even if it now demands quite a technological skillset in order to capitalise on the offered potentials.

Hopefully, this spellbinding haunting of the new will continue in some, let it be small or super-large, names in the industry.