[anigbrowl]

If you think hard enough you can probably come up with 10 music tech projects that had similar awesome promise and never delivered on it. Really, it's not like we're short of ways to make new weird timbres or timbres that are oddly redolent of others..but if weird is all you need, you can just buy a modular and be half-way to outer space already. As you know there, there's typically a vast waste of sonically uninteresting space in between the sweet spots - one reason I've become suspicious of synths whose primary claim is the broadness of the sound palette, because that promises endless tweaking for ultimately unsatisfying results.

[disantlor]

i think what is appealing to me is the idea of playing unexpected combinations of sounds of one another. and it's the drum example in particular that really caught me.

you can certainly make weird sounds with existing synths, but interpolating rhythmic sound with a harmonic sound is different to me in that the resulting thing is more rooted in a musical context and can work with other non-neural elements more easily.

for example, once you get some sort of intuition for how sounds might meld, you could compose a "beat" made up of samples (maybe drum sounds, maybe not) in the "left" side that is tailored to interact in certain ways against the "right" (i'm referencing the UI in the abelton video).

people might trade their "seed" sounds, or they might keep them close to the vest!

probably you could use max msp to do stuff like this already but i'm imagining that the "left" sound itself being thought of like an intuitive signal processing algorithm.

it's like second order sampling. you can find pieces of audio and, rather than use them directly, as today, you can create a third sound that probably can't be deconstructed back to the original.

might not birth a top-level genre like sampling did hip hop, but i think once someone puts it together the right way, and once processing power allows them to go beyond some the limitations described, it will really open some new avenues

[anigbrowl]

But you can do this already using tools like Tassman or one of the many spectral convolution/resynthesis tools. And if you have sufficient money to throw at analog or sufficient computing power to run a large digital modular tools like Reactor (or any number of others) you can do so many wild things with bandpass filters and envelope followers as modulation sources. I have a Nord Modular sitting next to me and realistically that and a sampler offer more timbral possibilities than can be explored in a single human lifetime.

I don't want to just piss on this, of course any new technology is interesting. But synthesizing novel timbres is just not a big deal in 2017. 'Just imagine what's possible' is still a great marketing line, but anyone waiting on some new technology to make sounds that nobody has ever heard before is suffering from a failure of imagination rather than a limitation of technology.

think of it this way, I could probably hop over to my local biohacking lab and find some way to map audio data onto DNA, modify it, and read it back out again using CRISPR. It would definitely be possible to encode audio information in DNA form. You know perfectly well it won't automatically give you more 'organic' or 'natural' sound despite the novel fact of doing the computation on a biological substrate, and you also know perfectly well that it would be marketed that way, just like almost every other synth is marketed on the basis of its wild creative possibilities.

It's like showing off your new graphic manipulation software with a picture resembling the Mona Lisa. You're selling some basic tools, but people are buying into the idea that having the tools will endow them with increased artistic ability. In reality everyone likes the new tool or filter you've come up with, it spreads rapidly to the point of over-familiarity, and then becomes fairly standard in future toolkits after the novelty has worn off.