The Future of Sequential Synthesizers.

[hoodoo_ray]

Is it time for Sequential to push boundaries and explore new innovative features in their synthesizers, such as incorporating AI technology or implementing touch-sensitive surfaces for enhanced expressiveness? How can Sequential stay ahead of the competition and continue to captivate musicians in the ever-evolving world of synthesis?

What would AI do in a synth? That’s not meant facetiously, genuine question!

[LPF83]

Is it time for Sequential to push boundaries and explore new innovative features in their synthesizers, such as incorporating AI technology or implementing touch-sensitive surfaces for enhanced expressiveness? How can Sequential stay ahead of the competition and continue to captivate musicians in the ever-evolving world of synthesis?

What would AI do in a synth? That’s not meant facetiously, genuine question!

Something like Synplant2 comes to mind?  Given an input signal, recreate it using only synthesizer sound generation methods, no sampling. 

Or better yet, generative via natural language, like you plug a microphone into the unit and say "Recreate that distorted and pitched wood block sound from the final chorus outro of Terrible Lie by Nine Inch Nails" and your synth just creates a patch that sounds and behaves like it.

I'm not saying options like these necessarily leads to better music workflow, but man they would be cool

[Quatschmacher]

Is it time for Sequential to push boundaries and explore new innovative features in their synthesizers, such as incorporating AI technology or implementing touch-sensitive surfaces for enhanced expressiveness? How can Sequential stay ahead of the competition and continue to captivate musicians in the ever-evolving world of synthesis?

What would AI do in a synth? That’s not meant facetiously, genuine question!

Something like Synplant2 comes to mind?  Given an input signal, recreate it using only synthesizer sound generation methods, no sampling. 

Or better yet, generative via natural language, like you plug a microphone into the unit and say "Recreate that distorted and pitched wood block sound from the final chorus outro of Terrible Lie by Nine Inch Nails" and your synth just creates a patch that sounds and behaves like it.

I'm not saying options like these necessarily leads to better music workflow, but man they would be cool

A friend of mine showed me Synplant a while ago. What an amazing bit of technology that is!

[chysn]

(Mod note: Split from power chord topic)

[Soundquest]

Not sure Sequential is the first synth company that to comes to mind in terms of making an AI synth.  I mean their mojo always seemed to be rooted in direct control- hand to knob.   If anything. I would think (I actually hope) they stay rooted in more traditional concepts, yet refined in form.     That being said, I'm sure AI will be the next synth craze....especially with the larger companies.  I try to be open minded, but somehow I think that could ruin the whole music making purpose for many.   

I assume that there's a certain a pride that we all get when making a patch or a song from scratch.  Like with any instrument, can you image taking the years of learning the intricacies and developing your knowledge on how to entice certain tones from your instrument and have it suddenly all replaced by the 12 year old neighbor kid speaking into a phone app to get instant results     I suppose that AI synth technology will be perfect for movie scorers and such, who need to pick and create quickly for their living.  But purely from a hobby perspective, other than the initial amazement of using such an AI system,  I would get bored pretty quickly. 

Its all part of a bigger question and sad inevitability I guess.  We already got to the point where everyone has become a pro photographer.  The crappiest raw photo can come out looking great with todays apps.  Likewise, soon, everyone will be a musician with AI.  It will become very huge, for a while.  As that  growth becomes the norm, what uniqueness will the "app" user have?  As traditional artists stop trying to compete with AI  and put their canvases and brushes into a forgotten bottom drawer, musicians will also stop plucking their strings or twisting their knobs.  After all, you  might feel like you have little new to offer to your friends that everyone else can easily also do.  Eventually, maybe boredom from instant gratification  sets in and people go back to the retro mechanisms to produce music.  But, who really knows....

I can see a dark phase in the short term of music whereby AI normalizes many potential young artistic hobbyists into "average ordinary guys".   Ironically the power of the tool box could be a restrictor plate where nobody is better than the next guy.  This could discourage those seeking an artistic/identity uniqueness. 

[dslsynth]

implementing touch-sensitive surfaces for enhanced expressiveness?

Simple solution: Add USB hosting ports on their instruments. MPE profile is well on the way and this permits users to add controllers of their own taste. In fact more than one USB hosting port could turn out to be very useful.

How can Sequential stay ahead of the competition and continue to captivate musicians in the ever-evolving world of synthesis?

That is left as an exercise for the Sequential's employees. Dave build a great team so I am sure they will live up to the expectations. As Soundquest mentioned Sequential is a more traditional company and AI may not be on the top of their TODO list.

[LPF83]

I assume that there's a certain a pride that we all get when making a patch or a song from scratch.

(Lots of other good thoughts not quoted for the sake of brevity, just wanted to partially capture the essence of your post)

I've written about it here, but for me it has always been about the journey, not the output...  I like the satisfaction I get from the creation process.  I haven't even shared musical output with anyone in a very long time because I never cared about attention or validation from others.  Musical creation is an amazing form of escapism for me, and that is all.

I can remember walking into a music store at the local shopping mall with my sister (who is a talented pro musician) when we were small kids where they had "Kimball" organs.  We were amused at the thought of someone wanting to buy a musical instrument that for the most part, played itself... or at least looked for ways to take the "burden of musicianship" off the player.  I couldn't fathom who would want that, or why it was a desirable thing that people would pay money for.  Many years later I was in a different shopping mall and I saw a really old guy in the middle of a food court playing what I guess is something like a modern arranger keyboard.  Lots of mediocre music coming out of the thing with very little effort on his part ...   but you know he really seemed to be having fun, and I realized he is "on that journey" described above, and good for him.

In the 80s we heard about how computers, algorithmic composers, drum machines etc. would kill the music industry.  I always felt that the focus on technology was missing the point...  music composition in my mind at least is almost always an expression of human feeling, and while the technology to fake that might be interesting, I knew as someone who had already been programming computers that even the best AI of the future would not reach the depth of complexity of human feeling and emotion.... ever actually.

Musical technical gadgets weren't what made it hard to make a living in the music industry....   simple human greed did, the same type of human greed that has long sucked the soul of out of so many art forms in the pursuit of commercial success.  If AI is trained on human knowledge, maybe it can acquire the same level of greed and soulessness, but in that case we are no worse off

So to be honest I don't see AI as any different.  It will have some novel impact on the industry for sure... but I see it as just another tool in the toolbox.  How best to utilize the technology will still be up to the creator.

Is there likely to be a lot of insufferably bad music created as a result of AI technology?   HAVE.NO.DOUBT.YES.

But that doesn't mean it needs to get in the way of our own journey.

[chysn]

I'll point out an ironic twist in this conversation, that the user that posted the AI question (as an off-topic response in a totally different thread) is probably a chatbot; I banned the account on the basis of multiple such off-topic and repetitive comments. I've seen the same kind of spam on other forums, too. But this one had interesting responses, so I split off the conversation.

Personally, I'd prefer to see AI solving the hard problems and thus freeing up humans' time to do the art, which seems like the long-view promise of AI. AI writing music and poetry while humans slog for minimum wage seems a bit backwards. But I do think we'll start to see tools that have actual value.

For the time being, though, AI largely exploits (a.k.a. "trains on") human-produced art and generates derivative works without consent of the humans who produced it. Plagiarism is presented as the start-of-the-art. The industry for throwing a wrench in this exploitation (especially in visual arts) is itself fascinating:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1082189/data-poisoning-artists-fight-generative-ai/

[LPF83]

For the time being, though, AI largely exploits (a.k.a. "trains on") human-produced art and generates derivative works without consent of the humans who produced it.

I think this is also AI's weakness, though -- at best, it only knows what output has come from that artist in the past, and does its best imitation.

So if we ask it to create a _________ (fill in blank with chord progression, melody, or lyrics etc) using the style of ________ (fill in the blank with desirable artist)...  at very best, it can create some permutations to choose from that reflect those past creations.  Assuming above desirable artist still has talent / wherewithall to create, their next creation could not be taken into consideration in the LLM until it is actually released (at which time it can only be "covered", which other bands already do, imitated, or permutated as above).

In other words I don't believe that the creativity that emerged from artist passion in the first place is supplanted by the use of AI.

Now, could it have OTHER economic side effects for the music industry?  For example, John runs a small sports bar at the beach with an 80's nostalgia theme.  As a cheaper option to licensing actual 80's music, he decides to stream music from a "discount fake 80's AI channel" that creates new 80's tunes that are different enough from the actual nostalgic hits that they do not invoke copyright problems.   I can see scenarios like that happening, and yes something like that could impact residual revenue to the artists on which that AI was trained.  But, at the end of the day I'm not sure it matters if it is AI doing the cheesy knockoff tracks or just cover bands.

There is another category of fakes (i.e. deep fake video, especially used in political contexts) which I think could be outright dangerous - but that's another story.

And yes the irony that an AI chatbot may have ignited this discussion is entertaining in itself

[dslsynth]

One interesting application of AI would be to map the space of potential sounds from a synthesizer and use that to identify the islands of good sounds in its ocean of noise. The problem is that one persons noise is another persons useful musical sound. Much like an artist told me with great passion some decade ago: painting in cold light source lit rooms make the paintings so UUUUGGGGGGGGLLLLLLLYYYYYYYYYYY!

Long live human creativity and human artistic visions!

[LoboLives]

I always find that the easier an art form is to produce, the less value the skill will have perceptually. Before in the 1950 when independent film was booming after the studios got sued by the government on the basis they were monopolies, when you said “I made a film.” It was a huge “wow” factor and when it played at a drive in it was valued as an accomplishment, regardless of quality.

Now when you tell someone you made a movie, the response is “me too, I shot it on my phone and it’s streaming on Tubi.”

The value of it has been so watered down that it constantly lowers the bar in regards to available resources. From a producer, investor and even cast and crew point of view, the mentality is alway to take the easy road.

In regards to music, composers are already competing with royalty free library music and AI will only make the situation worse. I had a fairly well known independent film studio reach out to me to do some soundtrack work for a feature and they kept low balling me until eventually they asked “Well, why should we pay you X amount when we can get this for free? Take what you can get.”

The idea of AI fuelled synths for me would result in the same feeling I get from synths with too many options. Options paralysis resulting in lack of identity.