[b1daly]

I wouldn’t say modern electronic music has a higher level of ‘sonic texture’ than orchestral music, or any music using traditional instruments. The difference is that in modern music ‘sonic texture’ is an explicit mode of “authorial expression.” The sonic textures creates by acoustic instruments are arguably richer, as they are capable of much more subtle modes of expression as playable instruments.

It’s just the case that the development of novel acoustics instruments is a whole separate craft, subject to the annoying vicissitudes of the sonic properties of physical matter. The instruments were developed over centuries.

As soon as instruments became electrified artists began using the ability to express themselves directly by manipulating the sounds themselves.

The sonic experimentation dominating modern pop music is entirely the result of the complete digitization of the sound generating chain.

I also think another factor is that digital synthesizers are woefully impoverished as instruments capable of expression through musical performance. Outside of the voice, modern pop is devoid of real-time musical expression. It’s become a non-real-time process, closer to writing, animation, the visual arts.

This forces the composer to rely on the native capacities of the instruments to express ideas, and the one that is completely unavailable in the acoustic realm is to chain the fundamental timbre of the instrument.

I’m a producer, recording engineer. The author of the original piece is missing that the only reasons a composer could imagine they were working primarily with the modes or melody, harmony, rhythm is that there is highly developed tradition of musicianship and instrument design to fill in the most fundamental aspect of music, which is the actual sound.

Edit: there is another huge factor in the decline of melody which is the product of two interrelated technology developments. The first is the use of loop based sequencing techniques for compositional work, and the second is that the random-access editing techniques made possible by modern digital audio workstations extended the loop based composition process to all sounds, including the voice.

Loops are basically short compositions. If you spend a lot of time in this mode or composition, your ideas will tend to be short. The actual mechanics of how the music is made disincline the composer from constructing both traditional harmony and melody.

The DAW has fundamentally disconnected music from the strict relationship with linear time that was inherent before the age of recording. To some extent musical notation allowed composers to work around this, but the end result was always an expression that had to have a thought out beginning, middle, and end.

I wrote an essay on this subject that I think is pretty good. https://dnamusiclabs.com/harmonic-distortion/daw-and-end-tim...

[Kye]

>> "The sonic textures creates by acoustic instruments are arguably richer, as they are capable of much more subtle modes of expression as playable instruments."

Synths are slowly catching up. You can pack quite a lot of expression into Serum with two wavetable oscillators, a noise and sub oscillator, modulating anything by note or velocity, alternate tunings, and a wide range of modulatable adjustments.

It's not a viola, but you can make some very unique instruments with it. Most people use it to make yet another dubstep bass or hypersaw, but the potential is there.

[b1daly]

I like Serum a lot, but it has the same set of issues that make all of these digital synths limited as performance instruments compared to, say, a piano.

The issue starts with the low resolution of MIDI. Most instruments implement only velocity connected to keys, with max 128 layers of resolution.

A real piano has near infinite resolution on velocity alone.

This exacerbates the issue that digital synths are generally deterministic, meaning for the same input they produce the same output.

Because the resolution of the controller is so low, attempts to introduce variety rely on randomness. In an acoustic instrument the same sound cant ever be produced twice. But this is a result of a complex, chaotic system, not randomness.

A major factor in the inherently chaotic sound is that each note is exciting the same physical object, even a note played with the same velocity (like a disklavier piano system could) will sound different every time based on the state of the whole large object. As notes are added to a chord or arpeggio, they are not just superimposed over each other, instead they each contribute their energy to the whole object.

The use of mod wheels definitely helps with expressiveness in the hands of a good player.

But my sense is that even “players” are forgoing using these instruments as performance tools, and instead loop the sections, and piece through the whole song, listening carefully, modifying the midi data directly based on what they a hearing.

This has definitely resulted in some very imaginative and striking work, but, to my ear anyway, it has a very different feel as a mode of artistic expression. It’s more “cerebral” in some way.

[circlefavshape]

As I've improved as a songwriter and composer over the years, it's been frustrating that the area in which I have least skill (sound design) has become the primary mode of expression in popular music

(As a listener though I find new music as engaging and exciting as I ever did)