Technology isn't what makes music modern. The points raised in the article go much, much deeper than that. This makes me think of the composer Conlon Nancarrow, who mostly composed for player piano. He was often credited as being a "father of electronic music", which baffled him. As far as he was concerned, he'd never composed a single note for an electronic music. But his music was the earliest attempt at seriously exploiting the ability of machines to play things humans could not play.

But synths and sequencers? They're not "modern". I find it hard to imagine music much more primitive than the boring wub-wub-wub of dubstep or the endless 4/4 oontz of Eurodance.

Serialization and 12-tone, for all their shortcomings, represented serious questioning of how notes should be organized at all. I think they failed because they dehumanized, and humanity is at the heart of music. A conscious disregard for consonance/dissonance isn't the same as choosing the balance of consonance/dissonance. They were interesting intellectual exercises, but as a musician, I think they deserved to die. They're the music of the past now.

Most of the real experimentalism in music I hear these days (and I have some bias here) is in the noise and free improvisation fields. I'm biased because I also play free improvisation. But undermining rhythm and harmony, and focusing on tonal evolution - that's interesting and daring. And that music is done with some seriously analog approach, not computers. Computers are generally very restrictive (although there are exceptions - the people doing million-note sequences are fascinating noise experimenters). One of the best modern music performances I've ever heard was an improvisation of one percussionist, who spent several minutes carefully wadding a piece of cellophane. It was complex, dynamic, exciting, and above all, musical - but it worked by tossing aside virtually every musical convention except "be interesting".

No, there is lots of experimentation in electronic music. "Dubstep" and "Eurodance" are not the only instantiations of electronically composed music.

I'd link you to some but I don't really care about convincing someone with unknown tastes.

Synths and sequences are tools, and are no more limiting than fingers or strings. Throwing away every musical convention might be interesting, but so is experimenting to see why those conventions developed in the first place. What parts of the structure can be removed? When and why?

Computers are generally very unrestrictive--they can be used to put together virtually any sound one can think of, as opposed to physical instruments which have physical limitations (although there are exceptions - the people doing pop music or the boring wub-wub-wub of dubstep or the endless 4/4 oontz of Eurodance have different goals in mind than mere experimentation, and they enforce their restrictions with their tools to help produce their ideas more effectively).

One of the best modern music performances I've ever heard was a live electronic performance where a single tone was generated and then manipulated on the spot beyond recognition. It was complex, dynamic, exciting, and above all, musical - but it worked only because of the availability of electronic musical tools.

Oh, if you have good examples of modern electronic music that's really experimental, please share! I try to keep my ears open to new things.

That said, I've used the tools of electronic music. I've composed with sequences and samples. I find physical instruments to be more directly expressive (I play guitar and drums myself, but I get the same vibe from keyboard, horn, and string players).

More importantly, though, I find restriction to be essential to playing interesting music. The more "unrestricted" the instrument, the more problematic it is. As a musician, I often use deliberately-imposed restrictions to narrow my choices and channel myself in certain directions. That's especially important in the improvisation world, where you don't have musical conventions to serve as boundaries.

I agree that it's extremely important to understand why musical conventions came to be, and experiment with structures that either generate or break those conventions. The flip side of my own music is playing with folk and "world music" forms. The contemporary music I find most interesting these days is cultural fusion music coming out of Israel, and out of the western Sahara desert. The "desert blues" of the Tuareg and other western Sahara tribes is an incredible reinterpretation of centuries-old tradition with modern instruments (mostly, electric guitar). And in Israel, there are second and third generation Arab Jews discovering the music of their grandparents and filtering it through their own Millennial internet-driven sensibilities. Musicians like Riff Cohen and Yemen Blues just boggle me. So, so cool.

I find it interesting that your comment mentions that restriction in sound leads to better musical creation, and the comment you're replying to remarks that the best electronic performance they saw was one where all the music was composed of one sample

I find it more interesting that the original comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13231557) found computers "generally very restrictive" and therefore uninteresting for experimentation...

And their reply to mine found computers "unrestrictive" and that they "find restriction to be essential to playing interesting music"

There are good restrictions, and bad restrictions. For example, you might want to program in a strictly typed language, because the restrictions solve other problems. But you might not want to program in FORTRAN, because its restrictions are mostly just painful.

To be more clear, though, I think I should have used the word "expressive" rather than "restrictive". I find it difficult to be expressive with computer-based music. And this is personal - I'm typing this while listening to a friend play an amazing live show with nothing but a Roland MC-808 beat box.

Given a guitar, I can do a lot with just one note, by modulating the timing and tone of that note. But I'm dependent on the direct physical feedback. The indirectness of computer interfaces dismays me. This isn't to say all computers are bad... certainly, I play with digital effects in my chain. My sound passes through computers and still sounds like me. But hopefully you see the point here.

There are conventions in improvisation.

"Free improvisation" is kind of a misnomer. A lot of improvisation is done within very strict structures - limitations, to use phrasing I used elsewhere. For example, most traditional jazz music is in 4/4 time, with circle of fifths western harmony. You can noodle over ii-V-I changes with a swing beat until the cows come home. Because you're settled in this warm bed of familiar grooves, chords, and tunes, everyone has a common language. Any random group of jazz musicians can get together, open up the Real Book, and perform group improvisation. And the audience, also accustomed to the conventions of jazz, can make value judgments and enjoy the performance, unencumbered by needing to figure out a 17/8 ostinato or the sound of just intonation.

I played for years in a free improvisation duo. One of the constraints we used (only for gigs) was "set lists". We would write titles for "songs", and interpret the titles. This helped us have beginnings and ends and moods.

If you're interested in this stuff for serious, seek out the book "Improvisation", by Derek Bailey. He was a famed improviser himself, and wrote a moderately academic book on musical improvisation in a wide variety of different contexts around the world.

I'm familiar with improvisation, thanks.

So am I, obviously.

> Serialization and 12-tone, for all their shortcomings, represented serious questioning of how notes should be organized at all. I think they failed because they dehumanized, and humanity is at the heart of music.

Beautifully put.

Off topic, but I think the same is true of brutalist architecture.

Modern pop music is to music what brutalism is to architecture. Cheap, repetitive, horrible.

that seems like a good comparision, brutalism also happened around after ww2.

Have you seen recently released software synths? They are much different from traditional analog synths and are capable of way more possibilities of sound. Definitely modern.

I don't get why "traditional" musicians tend to dismiss electronic music. Electronic music is not just dubstep or Eurodance. There are modern genres such as future bass that incorporate more advanced musical composition and implement it with new technologies that many people enjoy.

I hope I'm not coming off as dismissive of electronic music in general... just the idea that "computers and synthesizers and sequencers" represent the future of music. They are, at best, merely instruments. If anything, they're pretty strongly wedded to some very narrow musical conventions, such as 12 tone equal temperament and basic time signatures like 4/4 and 3/4. Getting past those limitations is doable, but difficult.

Electronic music can be wonderfully experimental, but that's not because of anything that's been invented lately. Listen to the Forbidden Planet soundtrack, for example. That was wild, and it was 1956. I work with a lot of electronic musicians, and there's a strong interest in older instruments - analog synthesis, early digital like 12 bit samplers, etc.

I've used recent software synths, but for the most part, they're either not all that interesting, or they're studied knockoffs of analog synthesis techniques from the 1970s and earlier. At worst, many/most hit Brian Eno's criticism of modern synths - they lack character. By trying to sound like everything, they wind up not sounding like themselves.

"If anything, they're pretty strongly wedded to some very narrow musical conventions, such as 12 tone equal temperament and basic time signatures like 4/4 and 3/4. Getting past those limitations is doable, but difficult."

It depends on what you're using. You can get anything from a system that can't be pulled off of 12 tone equal temperament and some conventional time signature all the way up to systems that offer complete and total freedom, up to and including setting the exact values in the .WAV file you generate. I wouldn't say getting past those restrictions are "difficult" necessarily, it's just that by necessity, the more power you take on yourself to define your music, the more work you're going to need to do. By the time you end up with the systems that offer total freedom you have music synthesis systems that look more like programming than musical instruments. But they do exist, and back on the topic of the original article, there's a lot of avant-garde-style work that has been done in them.

When I was going to school and minoring in electric music there was a guy playing with "granular synthesis"; his result sounded like telemetry. I'm not being particularly critical or cruel when I say that... that's seriously what his music sounded like. If you look at how telemetry is generated and compare to how granular synthesis works, it's not hard to see why. Tonality was entirely absent, let alone 12-tone equal temperament.

> When I was going to school and minoring in electric music there was a guy playing with "granular synthesis"; his result sounded like telemetry.

I actually have no idea what telemetry is supposed to sound like but I think this guy was just making bad music, with granular synthesis. Granular synthesis can actually be quite beautiful and tonal if thats what you're looking for, see examples [1] and [2] just to dig up some quick examples. Ableton's built-in time stretching uses granular synthesis. One guy's bad granular music isn't really indicative of anything.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6BU18mP3A

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ8zaGuaeBk

My point was not to snark about granular synthesis; my point was to demonstrate the amount of freedom that exists in synthesis methods that have been around for a long time. I understand the criticism that a lot of music is stuck in 12-tone equal temperament, I don't understand the idea that electronic music as a whole is stuck there.

I like the theory (which I think I associate with Ambrose Field) that we recently came out of a period in which invention in music was tightly associated with technological capability.

Most apparent in pop where, for example, each new wave of chart hits in the 80s was driven by the sounds available on some newly-released synth, but the same thing goes on with electro-acoustic music (timbrally, spatially) and modern classical music (in terms of organisation and programme content).

The theory is that this period has ended because we can pretty much synthesise anything now. (Or can we?)

If so, we no longer have the same motivating impulse. Where next?

Why not traditions? Why do we have to make progress? There are musical traditions that started in the second half of the 20th century, along with recording and radios, that I think will last for centuries. I wouldn't be shocked to hear electric blues, bluegrass, or thrash metal 300 years from now.

Good question, not one I have any tidy answer for.

The fact that we have so many "more traditional" genres in the first place is a result of some progress or invention having happened in the past. Why should it stop?

Novelty is something people seek in every field of course. But some of what makes music music (as opposed to just a soothing or vexing noise) has to do with anticipation and surprise. Perhaps novelty broadly is appealing to music listeners for similar reasons to why any music is appealing in the first place.

Although many forms in e.g. the classical canon might have been inspired by new technology of the day (most obvious example probably being the piano), genres have often arisen for reasons other than technology. It's plausible that our excursion through a hyper-speed series of technological drivers of musical novelty was just a crazy detour. But then we're back to the earlier question, what will it mean to put aside technological novelty as a driver? Or is it absurd to suggest that it has ended?

When a new popular genre gets invented or grabs the stage, like Trap music in the last couple of years, how do you view that?

It's pretty obvious that it's different from what was there before, so it is an innovation in that sense.

What's the take from "serious listeners" as mentioned in the article, just a mere stylistic change, I'm very curious about this.

As a cultural innovation, trap music is cool. But from a musical standpoint, it's not terribly innovative. It's still a lot of mid-tempo 4/4. The underlying dismantling of conventional harmony was done in hip-hop 30 years ago by Dr Dre, Terminator X, and other great innovative DJs of the early hip-hop era.

That said, I think hip-hop is THE driving force behind innovation in pop today. Even country music is now being driven by hip-hop concepts. The beats of trap will be around for a while, but they sure as heck didn't invent 808 kicks or filter sweeps.

And it's important to distinguish between cultural innovations and real, substantial changes here. Disco was a cultural innovation 40 years ago. It's more or less dead now. 45 RPM singles were a real, substantial change.

There was a paper I read some years ago about a music student analyzing modern trance music, how it relates to ancient tribal music, and how both relate to the brain. It also explained the mechanism behind the "drop", how the drop is caused by the brain anticipating it and then getting a reward for a good prediction, just like you feel nice when you can predict a twist in a movie or an ad.

What I am saying is that I think that what makes 4/4 so prevalent today is that it is somehow deeply connected to how our brains work, and if you consider popular music subject to Darwinian pressures, it is likely that 4/4 is the most "evolved" one (from a fitness view).

Anyway, I think that in 10 years we will be passing all of our music through a deep neural network, and then ask the network to create new things, like invent a new number one hit, cultural style, or create a new work in the style of Beethoven.

Disco is not dead in a pop context? Discos are full. 4/4 Beat is the norm. Ass shaking is standard. It's everywhere. The essence of disco and ass shaking is the essence of pop. Add sonified marriage/breakup proposals to it and then you got all pop in a basket.

Hiphop is not the driving force anymore, also it did not care about harmony at all in a special way. Hiphops focus has always been on rythm. The essence of hiphop is the political rap combined with sampling (pirate citations of all kind creatively layered together). Hiphop (especially rap) has been culturally annihilated.

Disco isn't just 4/4... it's a particular 16th note hi-hat groove, conventions around the use of string synths, etc. It's a stylistic period piece, and the underlying rhythms aren't widely heard these days.

I don't know why you think hip hop has been "culturally annihilated". I hear it as an incredibly dynamic and forward-looking genre.

   it's a particular 16th note

Every pop music genre has a signature sound. This is acoustic branding. It's vital for pop-music to function that the audience can determine in a fraction of a second what brand is being offered. Nothing deep going on.

   I hear it as an incredibly dynamic 
   and forward-looking genre.

What dynamic and forward-looking about 3 decades of "where da hoes at where da bitches at"?

Yes, that 70's disco sound. That's gone; Like a snake 'Disco' has shed its skin. My point is that the essence of disco is pretty much alive. Take that to the contrast that the innovative essence of hiphop is resampling - that's pretty dead. Can you name any currently successful hip hop band that does radical resampling over all genres? It's not possible because of music industry lobbying.

> Take that to the contrast that the innovative essence of hiphop is resampling

Resampling isn't particularly innovative as Im sure you aware of musique concrete and tape music. Hip-hop is essentially defined by the combination of rapping, sociopolitical subtexts, and, yes, specific music production techniques that include sampling but also certain types of rhythms and beats. Those are roughly in order of importance; notice how few people openly lament the death of sampling but the prominence of a white rapper will prompt endless critical and popular commentary.

> that's pretty dead.

Anyone who can listen to To Pimp a Butterfly and believe that hip hop is dead does not know what hip hop is.

> Can you name any currently successful hip hop band that does radical resampling over all genres?

When has this been the criterion for what makes a hip hop band?

House music is 'just' disco played on an 808. Or that's how it started anyway.

   As a cultural innovation, trap music is cool.

In what sense? It's same old same old "Where da hoes at where da bitches at" soft-porn junk that the distraction industry has been selling to teenagers for about 3 decades.

can you quickly summarise what makes trap trap and what is the special invention here?

Part of the problem is that most electric music comes as a simulated band of robots playing in a virtual space materialised as sound through a loudspeaker. Modern electronic music has more in common with a police siren than music in the cultural sense. 'Music' as a deeply rooted cultural term is quite conservative, probably the most conservative art form there is. Therefore it's primarily bound to 'oldskool' rites, techniques and tools. It's also heavily human-centric (one of the main reasons serial music is not a big hit) and thus demands direct engagement of man as composer, interpret and performer. Serial music shares profound similarities to conceptual machine music as it is composition with strict binary rules, but is still interpreted and performed with traditional instruments. As such it is already quite a borderline concept for the traditional Music world. Now if you want them to talk about softsynths that's of no interest to them at all because it happens on quite a different planet to them, to which i would agree.

I expect the article doesn't mention them because it views them as a means to an end. Since the article is about high-level philosophical concerns and not the nuts and bolts of how the music is created, talking about compositional/performance tools such as computers and synthesizers would be out of place -- the article is more concerned with the aesthetic goals which these or other tools would be used toward rather than the tools themselves.

Anyway the article does actually mention electronics at least twice, althouh both times mostly in passing:

"I draw your attention to the example we heard yesterday, when Nathan Davies used live filtering to give the effect of resonators, extracting tones from white noise, and turning those tones towards music."

"Joanna Bailie, to take just one example, has used the recorded and digitally processed sounds ..."