The Sound of Digital Music

Blog post 3

Digital technology has created a whole genre of music - cybermusic. No longer is music a pure display of artistic talent and one's connection with the mysterious realm of music, it is now a display of how expensive your software plugins are, how great your digital recording equipment is, how familiar you are with digital composition programs and their complex virtual interface, and how good you are at virtually marketing your virtually created virtual commodities.

 The beauty of traditional instruments - something digital technology can never simulate

Traditional music focuses on user interaction, Power of each pluck, force of each keystroke, movement of the arms, fingers, and mind, all affect the sound. The musician, in a way, is bonded to the instrument he or she plays. Digital music, on the other hand, uses VST (Virtual Studio Technology) plugins that act as “soundfonts”. Just as regular fonts make up each letter of the alphabet, soundfonts are digitally created fonts of music notes that can be stringed together by the user to create a tune. Digital music focuses on accessibility, as anyone is able to play around with said technology and create music. However, the musician is separated from the instrument he or she plays… the barrier is the computer screen and the incomprehensible lines of code that turns music into 0’s and 1’s. Digital music is rather like Lego, you take one soundfont here, one sound effect there, and you piece together various sounds in infinitely many combination limited only by the imagination… but each piece by itself is limited and artificial.

 Quantum Leap - SILK, by Eastwest, a collection of very high quality Asian ethnic instruments such as the Erhu (二胡), Pipa (琵琶), and Yangqin (扬琴). With quality comes price... up to $1000 per pack. So if you're planning to get some flutes, violins, guitars, drums, maybe even a saxophone, you're looking at around $3000 in virtual instruments. Yeah you're trading binary code for a real antique violin.

Companies like Eastwest fully take advantage of this new cyberculture - digital composition and transaction of music, by selling virtual instruments. I admit that these sound ridiculously real... because they were recorded with real instruments obviously. The engineering behind these sounds are absolutely superb, and in my opinion no other software comes even close to the realism that these instruments provide, especially with harder-to-mimic strings instruments such as the violin and erhu. However when virtual instruments start to also simulate the pricing of real instruments... then there's a problem. Would you trade your antique violin for a virtual violin? Perhaps it is "easier to play" (I mean all you have to do is click buttons instead of breaking your neck trying to play a real violin)? Perhaps it is easier to distribute your music when it's created virtually? Or perhaps easier to edit or enhance your music when it's in digital form? All of these are selling points for the massive markets created for digital music.

You can't substitute a live performance for a digital one... no software can mimic the intricacy of the human imagination

Eastwest is only one of the hundreds of companies who excel in the digital engineering and distribution of music, although a very adept one at that. But you can never substitute a live performance of Pachelbel's Canon in D, by a performance artificially created in a software like FL Studio 9. The strength of each note, the fluidity of each arc, all of these come from the human imagination and emotion. The music feeds on the performer's thoughts, where each note is unique and only exist in that single performance. These simply cannot be digitalized by software, because human emotion and imagination cannot be transcribed into lines of code. As a result, any digital piece will immediately sound bland compared to a live performance. Although digital technology has made music more accessible (excluding prices), everyone now has the same set of tools, where people are no longer limited by their imagination, rather now they’re limited by what sounds these plugins can make.