Music production
fromFast Company
1 day agoThe future of music is human-generated
The music industry's value is shifting from songs to the human connection behind performances as AI-generated music becomes abundant.
I love reading about bands. I've read the AllMusic reviews of my favorite albums multiple times over. If my Apple Music selection has a writeup to go with, I'll read it. And I can read a good band book in a matter of hours. I'm not a professional nostalgia whore, but reading about these bands really does put me back in that time, and in that headspace. Like the music itself! I can't get enough of that particular high.
Galen Buckwalter, a 69-year-old research psychologist and quadriplegic, participated in a brain implant study to contribute to science that aids those with paralysis. The six chips in his brain decode movement intention, allowing him to operate a computer and feel sensations in his fingers again.
By the early 1900s, player pianos had evolved to more fully reproduce a human performance, including subtle dynamics like tempo changes and the introduction of a damper pedal. The human role went from deskilled to fully deprecated as electric motors replaced foot-powered bellows. With the Seeburg Lilliputian Model L, the only job left for humans who wanted to play the piano in the 1920s was to put in a coin.
Built in 2000, the two-story house on a corner lot has plenty of curb appeal. A black-hued gable roof creates visual contrast against crisp white siding and shutters. A white picket fence wraps around the front of the property.
R&B in the 21st century has been in a constant state of flux, tugged between safe traditionalism and blurry attempts at progression. For the last decade-plus that "progression" has seen R&B music become more indebted to trap records and the moody atmospherics of alternative bands like Radiohead, Coldplay, or My Bloody Valentine.
In recent years, multimedia content has firmly established itself online, fueled by the development of high-speed Internet technologies as well as the growing availability of tools for creating and editing video. The global lockdowns also contributed to this process by forcing people to look for similar alternatives on the web. If integrating video into your communications sounds like an overwhelming investment, start leveraging your products with music and audio that are often underestimated by marketers.
Tim Zha is looking for the soul in the machine. While some might hear Auto-Tune as masking a singer's humanity, the London-based artist filters his vocals to highlight technology's inseparability with our notions of self. This is ground well-trodden by Afrofuturist techno pioneers, Atlanta trappers, and PC Music hyperpoppers; for Zha, Auto-Tune represents what he calls the "coincidence of human subjectivity and the networked machine system."
But to anyone tracking the data over the past few years, it was inevitable. In 2022, Bad Bunny's Un Verano Sin Ti redefined the market, driving Latin music's streaming growth to new heights. It later became the first Spanish-language album nominated for Grammy Album of the Year. The takeaway is simple: When you have accurate, real-time data, you don't guess where culture is going, you know.
The Phase8 uses a new form of "acoustic synthesis" that combines acoustic sound generation with electronic control. Takahashi says the synthesizer is "beyond analog vs. digital" and "beyond electronics" altogether. It features chromatically tuned steel resonators, which creates an acoustic sound similar to that of a kalimba. These signals can be manipulated via onboard effects and sequenced like a traditional synthesizer. Here's a video of the synth in action.
I've just given a keynote presentation at Lines of Flight: Improvisation, Hope and Refuge, a conference hosted by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. I'd been invited to talk about my performance research with Dálava, a cross-genre project that is influenced by animist, Slavic cosmology and a land-based folk song tradition that has been in my family for generations.
Wooden spoons as microphones, siblings spinning in socks across the floor, a mother laughing as Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" fills the room for the third time in a row-this is love. Long before children understand romance, they learn connection this way, through synchronized movement, shared joy, and the safety of familiar songs. Research on rhythm and social bonding suggests that moving in time together can regulate the nervous system and strengthen feelings of connection.
There is a new Pitchfork subscription -only costs $5 a month-that gives readers the ability to score albums, comment on our reviews, and chop it up with our writers, editors, and one another. With the power to score albums now firmly in your hands, it's only fitting that we try to give you a better understanding of how we rate albums.