[jay-anderson]

Synthesized musical instruments never sound quite right (the best I've heard are the vienna symphonic library: https://www.vsl.co.at/en). While that doesn't appear to be the goal of this specific work, some of the wavenet approaches seem like they could be used towards that end. Even if this requires rendering the audio for an instrument slower than real time it would be a nice achievement if it can improve the quality. (Studio musician jobs I think are safe for quite a while still.)

[TheOtherHobbes]

Most instruments can make a wide range of different sounds, and players can move smoothly between the different sounds by playing the instrument in different ways.

This is really a kind of morphing. You can capture examples of each kind of sound with sampling, but you can't capture the performance morphing. Even if you could, there's no good way to perform the morphing with a typical synth keyboard, which only allows for velocity and maybe aftertouch - possibly poly AT for a handful of models.

So these huge sample sets have started using rule-based systems to try to add the morphing, or at least to make sample choices, in a context-sensitive way. This kind of works, up to a point, but it's not as good as the real thing.

As a side effect, sampling has driven jobbing composers, especially in Hollywood, towards an industry standard mechanical and repetitive orchestral sound.

It sounds orchestra-like, but it's a narrow and compressed version of all the colours an orchestra is capable of. If you compare it to the work of master orchestrators - Ravel, Stravinsky, Puccini - it's not hard hear just how flat and colourless these scores are.

A good ML model of an orchestral instrument would be a very useful thing, because it would make it possible to think about breaking out of the sampling box. But there aren't enough people with enough of a background in both ML and music to make this likely.

Sadly, I think it's more likely we'll get even more compressed and narrow representations, with even more of the subtlety and expressive range removed.

[pierrec]

Modern virtual instruments are capable of much more than what standard Hollywood soundtracks might make you think.

1) Performance morphing. We have moved from straightforward sampling to hybrid sampled/synthesized approaches. It will never be as good as the real thing, but it already allows for richer performances than what a boring player would do. Here is an example of a virtual clarinet (Sample Modeling Clarinet). I sequenced many variables separately to demonstrate: vibrato depth, vibrato speed, legato and portamento speed, growl, pressure and accent on the attack.

http://007ee821dfb24ea1133d-f5304285da51469c5fdbbb05c1bdfa60...

2) Extended techniques. Competition has encouraged virtual instrument publishers to go for the unusual stuff, and fill whatever niche hasn't been filled yet. For example I recently acquired a library specialized in extended cello technique (Jeremiah Pena Mystic). I used it in the soundtrack of a no-budget short film, here's an excerpt of the cello part:

http://007ee821dfb24ea1133d-f5304285da51469c5fdbbb05c1bdfa60...

Anyways, I agree that Hollywood soundtracks have been converging to standardized styles, and sampling may be to blame historically, but it is hardly a limiting factor anymore. If anything, it should now encourage creativity as it partly removes the fear of wasting massive resources when your experimental score ends up sounding like crap at the recording session.

[buzzybee]

It's not purely the sampling that's doing it to Hollywood: In some fashion, it's the heavily-derisked blockbuster formula to blame, and technology comes along for the ride.

Tony Zhou's Every Frame A Painting [0] offered a take on how the tendency is to work very closely to a temp track and then ask for something identical, which of course can only get you increasingly similar sounds. Dan Golding responded to this by adding some nuance, noting that temp tracks have always been in use, so the answer has to be a little more complicated, and he points back to the technology. [1] I would say that the technology is just a piece of the puzzle; you can order in a different type of sound and get it, whether or not you're using a computer-heavy approach. That's aptly demonstrated by the variety seen in indie games, for example. This is a problem that movies have made for themselves by being focused on fitting everything to a formula. The occasional film does slip through that has a great score that draws on something bigger than other films(for one example: Scott Pilgrim vs the World).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vfqkvwW2fs [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcXsH88XlKM

[Keyframe]

Isn't Vienna Symphonic Library sampled instead of synthesized?

[smrtinsert]

Yep. Use their soundfonts.