If you could design a music product ..

[Peter Korsten]

Jay Vaughan schreef op 7-1-2014 10:42:

> .. what would it be?

Something that takes the principles of evolution to sound design.

Whether this is something that the music industry needs is doubtful: 
synths aimed at sound design have never been great commercial successes. 
But given the chance, it's something I would do.

As for evolutionary sound design, I'm envisioning this as something 
where you start from a know sound - it could be from a sample, or a 
preset, or some analogue or physical modelling, or something you heard 
at 2:14 in a certain YouTube video - and start modifying that.

This modification would be done by changing a vaguely defined parameter. 
Say, you want the sound to be more aggressive, or creakier, or rounder. 
You would somehow set how much more aggressive or creakier or rounder it 
should be.

The instrument then gives you a couple of variations, say four or eight. 
You play them, choose the one you like most, and the process starts from 
the beginning again, allowing you to change another parameter.

The tricky part will be to come up with a sensible list of parameters 
that you want to be able to change, and what the effect should be. What 
is a round sound anyway? The list of parameters is potentially endless.

When it comes to non-core functionality, it should be able to connect 
with everything that is currently en vogue. So there has to be an app 
for several different platforms, to do sound design when away from your 
synth; it should connect to your smart phone/tablet/watch/fridge via 
Bluetooth (and not some esoteric protocol that you happen to like but 
that nobody uses); it should have the ability to store your precious 
sounds in a cloud; you should be able to share your sounds with your 
friends; all that sort of thing. Hook it up to the internet. If your 
phone can do it, so can your synth.

But what's more important than anything else is that it should be 
SIMPLE. I read a review of the Roland Jupiter-80 the other day, and my 
head swam. How complex can you make one synth? I'm not at all interested 
in how many oscillators I have or how many dB's my filter has: I just 
want it to sound good - whatever that means.

Please note that I deliberately didn't mention how the interface should 
look like. What's described above could be done in many different ways, 
be it in hardware, or on a touch screen, or with a mouse, or with a 
Minority Report kind of interface. That also gives you the possibility 
to carry your sounds from one environment to another.

- Peter