I’m talking mostly about new things you can do musically due to technology. The particular example I was thinking of was autotune, but that was actually invented in the late 1990s (whoops).
But digital signal processing in general has benefited hugely in Moore’s Law, and the ease afforded by being able to apply tens or hundreds of filters in real time. The phase change moment was when a musician could do this in faster than 1x time on a home PC. The past decade has been mostly on the top of the S-curve, though.
Nevertheless, treating all synthesis as one thing is simply an incorrect model.
Funny coincidence. About a week ago I was telling someone that people sometimes give autotune as an example of a qualitatively new musical/aural device, even though Godley & Creme basically did it 30+ years ago. (Which doesn’t contradict what you’re saying; just because it was possible to mimic autotune in 1979 doesn’t mean it was trivial, accessible, or doable in real time. Although autotune isn’t new, being able to autotune on an industrial scale presumably is, ’cause of Moore’s law.)
I’m talking mostly about new things you can do musically due to technology. The particular example I was thinking of was autotune, but that was actually invented in the late 1990s (whoops).
But digital signal processing in general has benefited hugely in Moore’s Law, and the ease afforded by being able to apply tens or hundreds of filters in real time. The phase change moment was when a musician could do this in faster than 1x time on a home PC. The past decade has been mostly on the top of the S-curve, though.
Nevertheless, treating all synthesis as one thing is simply an incorrect model.
Funny coincidence. About a week ago I was telling someone that people sometimes give autotune as an example of a qualitatively new musical/aural device, even though Godley & Creme basically did it 30+ years ago. (Which doesn’t contradict what you’re saying; just because it was possible to mimic autotune in 1979 doesn’t mean it was trivial, accessible, or doable in real time. Although autotune isn’t new, being able to autotune on an industrial scale presumably is, ’cause of Moore’s law.)