The Greatest Thing Technology Has To Offer...

The greatest thing technology has to offer us are the endless possibilities it provides to solving our problems. One problem it cannot solve however is our laziness. Our computers, our phones, tablets, software, gadgets, and of course electronic instruments have almost limitless possibilities (there are limits but most of us never come close to finding those limits unless it is how many mp3’s can fit on a computer till there is no memory left) but we find only a few possible needs for them and ignore the rest of what they are capable of doing.

Synthesizers for example turned the audio industry on its head when they first were made accessible to the masses in the late 60’s and early 70’s, so much so that the American Federation of Musicians banned them from soundtracks because they thought they would replace real instruments and the musicians that played them altogether. If you wanted to use a synthesizer in the early days, they were so complex that you had to go through training to better understand it and get sounds to come out of it. They were so complex, some bands had trained synthesists (synthesists or sound patch creators is a more accurate term) come, riffle through sounds till the artist found one he or she liked, and then let the artist perform.

As time went on computing power increased, components became smaller, and synthesizers could be packed with more features such as sound banks, parameters with more control, or even different ways to control the synthesizer and the sounds it could produce. While most would naturally think that these options benefited the musician they actually hindered its synthetic evolution.

Most consumer synthesizers today are no more then glorified sampling keyboards. The manufacturers were able to fit everything that the original manufacturers put in large wooden boxes into a sleek, tiny keyboard with about an 1/8^th of the knobs and in my opinion functionality. This reduction in size and functionality ultimately hindered one’s ability to create sounds, making it easier to just go with the factory presets. My problem with presets is that they sound just like, well, presets. If I want I can go listen to any up and coming electronic artist with a synthesizer and I will wager that 9 times out of 10, they don’t even know how to properly work it (and that’s assuming that they have an actual hardware synthesizer, not just a DAW such as Reason that models its plugins off of analog and digital synthesizers).

My problem with technology is that we want it to be easy and we want it to solve our problems, when instead we should realize that the solution isn’t always easy and instead of relying on the technology to solve our problems for us, we can use the technology as a means to solve the problem ourselves.

The images below show the difference in thought processes between a machine with infinite possibilities and a marketable "all in the box" synthesizer.

An example of an "extreme" analog modular synthesizer.

An example of a minimal digital synthesizer.

...My mistake in "Player Piano" was my failure as a futurist. I did not foresee transistors, and so imagined that super computers would have to be huge, with bulky vacuum tubes taking up a lot of space. -Kurt Vonnegut in "Letters"