Since you're a guitarist, there's also this Swedish guitar, which purports to solve the tuning problem (which I tend to think is not a problem but an essential part of the instrument's sound) https://youtu.be/-penQWPHJzI
But the normal, "imperfect" guitar does not sound bad. I would also say, this "imperfection" gives a guitar its typical sound in the first place, so it's not a "problem".
Both guitars in that video are great, but indeed quite different.
Prediction: society demotes all of the auto-tuning and AI art to training status, and actual art produced by himans with pulses is preferred.
My favorite style of music (Psytrance) almost requires digital "perfection".
It's even not really possible to create a "properly sounding" Psytrance bass-line¹, not even a most basic variant, without doing some math (or using tools that will do that math for you). Frequencies, pitch, tempo, and phase need to match constantly and absolutely perfect, or it won't sound properly. Any "humanization" on any preset would kill the sound instantly!
For that reason creating Psytrance is a very "mechanical" task that only machines can perform with the required precision. (And not every machine is good enough for that actually. You need for example oscillators with very high precision or you will experience unwanted artifacts, especially on higher frequencies, that could destroy the sound).
Something that could create "perfectly matching" chords that don't include any dissonance would be really useful to get the (most of the time) desired "ultra-clean" Psytrance sounds. The usual alternative is to filter out all dissonance. But that's a lot of work, or in "bigger" chords or soundscapes outright impossible (even when you slice the sound in the frequency spectrum with all kind of tricks; filters also produce artifacts… And trying to get rid of those artifacts, like phase imperfections, changes the sound again in often undesired ways. A "perfect" tuning form the get go would maybe help with such things).
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¹ Here two of the better tutorials for Psytrance bass-lines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m40xkEkrEKo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4B1NcdNJjE
And if you're lazy see here for a VST plugin send form the gods:
B) this is a subjective point, and one accepts your POV as valid
C) your POV may prove a minority one over time. Or not.
B), C)
I don't think all that electronic "magic" will go away anytime. It's more or less a prerequisite to create some kinds of sounds, which you just can't "manufacture".
It's not only about pure electronic music.
Almost all modern productions in all kinds of genres are depended on the usage of computers (and other machines). All that tech makes modern sounding peaces possible in the first place.
Even seemingly "maximal analog" music (like for example classic orchestra) sounds on a record the way it sounds because there was a lot of digital processing to remove all kinds of imperfections form the recorded raw audio, and of course a lot of of other post-processing.
Also I think it's clear what the majority prefers: People are asking actually for better produced pieces, otherwise the market wouldn't have moved that way.
Back in the day you would need to record and produce in one of that big, very expensive, well know studios somewhere around the world if you wanted to land a hit. The tech in those studios is worth millions to this day. Nobody would have invested in such a thing if people wouldn't have liked the results coming out there. (Today it's thankfully much cheaper to have a good recording; actually some small HW setup and a powerful PC with SW for only a few thousand bucks is more or less enough to sound absolutely professional, if you only know what you're doing of course).
On the other hand your actually right in some sense:
In a lot of genres "absolute perfection" isn't a goal. We use computers to remove "random (human / physical) imperfection" but add in on the other side some "humanization" into the sounds by digital means.
I think there is at the moment even a kind of trend to add more realistic, powerful, and interesting "humanization" possibilities to digital instruments. ("Humanization" or "randomization" knobs aren't anything new, but those functions get extended lately I think; for example you can use now AI instead of simply adding some randomness to some parameters).
So yes, we want to keep "natural" sounds to some degree. But by now we're using computers to artificially make the things that we're producing digitally sound more "natural". :-)
I think the core point here is control. To have something sound really great you need to be able to control every aspect of the sound, even the most tiny details. "Imperfections" are OK, or even actually desired, but only as long as they're added deliberately and remain controllable.
How to tune synthesizers this way? What and where to buy?
Edit: this table says that Access have hardware synths with Hermode tuning: http://www.microtonal-synthesis.com/micro_af.html . Elsewhere I see Waldorf listed as having offered Hermode in some models.
We've had self-tuning instruments for thousands of years. Vocal harmony has almost always been perfectly tuned for its key. Likewise orchestral strings are fretless and can produce perfect intervals. Equitemperment was an innovation in the 17th century because it approximated the perfect intervals very well ("sounded good") but also permitted the ability to simultaneously represent scales based on every note in the circle of fifths ("sounded interesting"). But the "real" chords were always (well, since the late middle ages) understood to be integer ratios.
To be clear, I'm trying to explore the idea that individual songs have optimal tunings because they only use certain intervals. So, something more fine grained even then singing for a particular key.
So the compromise we've all settled on is that we play music in the equitempered scale, and only adjust a little bit here and there to exploit perfect tunings in limited, style-dependent ways.
Which is to say: perfect chords are interesting flavor, but at the end of the day kinda boring in isolation; "real" music needs more rules.
(This is also the same mechanism at work when an entire choir singing an unaccompanied piece goes flat without realizing it. Someone will not quite make an ascending interval, and everyone else will adjust to cover it.)
(1) Example: "get up an get out" by Iggy Pop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1ld5jG3f-M
So basically, a woodwind like a sax will tune a few notes with a piano or whatever, but it's really up to the player to keep playing in tune. I would not even bother trying to autotune or use post-processing; it'll just sound weird.
This is also how you can get a room full of student musicians "tuned" but it still sounds like a disaster.
usually that’s not the case though. typically it’s individual notes. much harder to precisely and accurately modulate tape velocity (especially by hand).
This sort of hybrid tuning is common in barbershop quartet singing as well.
Also the tonal glides sound like an old broken record player. (This creates a sensation of "wobbling speed", which sounds just wrong).
Hmm, my ears are still ringing, even while writing this; that was not a pleasant experience to be honest…
I guess I need some ear-bleach. Psytrance to the rescue! Let's see, maybe, hmm, Talpa¹, or maybe better that old Atma set²?
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I think a clearer demonstration might be to have a side by side comparison of a fairly simple tune in 12TET vs in this dynamical tuning.
Still, it's kinda like alien music and it's certainly creative.
https://en.xen.wiki/w/Adaptive_just_intonation
But there seem to be differences. Some demos have those tonal glides (that I don't like) but some don't (and sound just great).
Could someone explain in a "TL;DR" what's going on here?
But I see, that wiki I just found seems to be full of info. But it will take time to read all that… Would prefer to have some VSTs to just play around with. Any tips?
Another thing that happens is that both English and French change their pronunciation over time. After English imports a word, the French pronunciation may change making the English word look odd or not even look connected. Not sure that this happened to “timbre” but it did happen to words like “chief” and “chef”. Both were imported from French but at different times. “Chief” when French used the hard ‘ch’ sound and “chef” when French had switched to the soft ‘sh’ sound.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/timbre https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Timbre
As a guitarist we often swap guitars or retune to make certain songs easier to play, or to be able to get a certain tamber put of the note. But I never considered it as a way to address temperament.
It's interesting to think how much of music theory emerges out of reconciliation with available instruments, as opposed to reconciliation with the ear.