What's next in music? The music of the future is...
What is the future?
One thing that seems hard to get information or speculation on, even on the World Wide Web, is what the future of music is going to entail.
Sure, there's a lot of info out there with projections and statistics on the music industry itself and all the money it has, (or has been losing) and there are occasionally lists of the newest musical subgenres, but as far as what the future styles of music will actually be, there's not too much out there.
Looking at the past:
In the ultra-long view, we've went from bone pipes to 3-d virtual synthesizers. That's an unbelievable amount of improvement. So in total, we've went far, and the projection would be that we'll go further.
In the long view, from 1500 to now, we started with the very beautiful choral polyphonic style of Palestrina, followed by Monteverdi's invention, more or less, of Baroque music. (that was fairly widely complained about at the time) The apex of that epoch was Telemann, Bach, and Hรคndel. Then came the deceptively simple air of the Classical style proper, followed by the intensity and complexity, and at times impressionistic simple beauty of the Romantic era, then art music diverged increasingly with popular music as people became more out-of-touch with atonal and avant-garde music. After about 1910, I would look primarily at popular music instead of art music to predict the future of music.
More narrowly, we've seen technology grow at an exponential rate. From 5000 BC to 500 AD, there was an improvement, but not enormous. Then to 1500 AD, there was another large improvement, in a much shorter amount of time, then about the same amount of progress until 1800, then 1920, then 1980, then now. If things stayed at this rate, we would have a paradigm shift of musical production by about 2040.
How far can technology go?
The fundamental constraint of musical development is the fact that sound waves are restricted to a two-dimensional waveform. Therefore, any vertical change in shape must be accompanied by a horizontal shift. For an example, try drawing a waveform on a synth like Bitinvaders on LMMS. It quickly becomes obvious that there are only so many sounds out there. The new development of 3-d time based synthesis, as in the newest iteration of Ableton, improves things somewhat, (although modular synths could manage this I'm sure in the past) through its gradual and very sophisticated shifting of waveforms. Still however, I can only imagine one or two more of these types of changes being possible at all. Sound simply cannot consist of anything but frequencies through the air, and those are inherently limited. I feel that this grasping at new heights has led us somewhat close to the ceiling of our current ability to produce and hear music.
In Reality
That said, the types of music that are actually listened-to and produced are not as extreme as the very experimental sounds that are fooled-around with but never find much of an audience. Therefore, even if we reached the limit of sound production by 2040, it would probably take until 2080 or later to actually exhaust most of the capabilities of music in the public's eye. Music shifts slowly enough, even at its increasing rates, to stay somewhat behind the best technical capabilities of our software. (of course, acoustic instruments are getting better and changing too, but that is a more nuanced topic, and the changes are generally more subtle there, such as Barenboim's new/old piano design.)
Paradigm Shifts
What I imagine, and what will hopefully happen before we exhaust every nook of sound synthesis, is a paradigm shift in what music is in the first place. With virtual reality and extreme leaps of so many areas of products, it's not hard to imagine the fundamental nature of music becoming more three-dimensional as well. I like to imagine interactive geometric visualizations of the sound, or journeys throughout landscapes inspired by parts of the music, but that's just a start. Perhaps even more could be accomplished.
A new Total Art?
One thing that seems hard to get information or speculation on, even on the World Wide Web, is what the future of music is going to entail.
Sure, there's a lot of info out there with projections and statistics on the music industry itself and all the money it has, (or has been losing) and there are occasionally lists of the newest musical subgenres, but as far as what the future styles of music will actually be, there's not too much out there.
Looking at the past:
In the ultra-long view, we've went from bone pipes to 3-d virtual synthesizers. That's an unbelievable amount of improvement. So in total, we've went far, and the projection would be that we'll go further.
In the long view, from 1500 to now, we started with the very beautiful choral polyphonic style of Palestrina, followed by Monteverdi's invention, more or less, of Baroque music. (that was fairly widely complained about at the time) The apex of that epoch was Telemann, Bach, and Hรคndel. Then came the deceptively simple air of the Classical style proper, followed by the intensity and complexity, and at times impressionistic simple beauty of the Romantic era, then art music diverged increasingly with popular music as people became more out-of-touch with atonal and avant-garde music. After about 1910, I would look primarily at popular music instead of art music to predict the future of music.
More narrowly, we've seen technology grow at an exponential rate. From 5000 BC to 500 AD, there was an improvement, but not enormous. Then to 1500 AD, there was another large improvement, in a much shorter amount of time, then about the same amount of progress until 1800, then 1920, then 1980, then now. If things stayed at this rate, we would have a paradigm shift of musical production by about 2040.
How far can technology go?
The fundamental constraint of musical development is the fact that sound waves are restricted to a two-dimensional waveform. Therefore, any vertical change in shape must be accompanied by a horizontal shift. For an example, try drawing a waveform on a synth like Bitinvaders on LMMS. It quickly becomes obvious that there are only so many sounds out there. The new development of 3-d time based synthesis, as in the newest iteration of Ableton, improves things somewhat, (although modular synths could manage this I'm sure in the past) through its gradual and very sophisticated shifting of waveforms. Still however, I can only imagine one or two more of these types of changes being possible at all. Sound simply cannot consist of anything but frequencies through the air, and those are inherently limited. I feel that this grasping at new heights has led us somewhat close to the ceiling of our current ability to produce and hear music.
In Reality
That said, the types of music that are actually listened-to and produced are not as extreme as the very experimental sounds that are fooled-around with but never find much of an audience. Therefore, even if we reached the limit of sound production by 2040, it would probably take until 2080 or later to actually exhaust most of the capabilities of music in the public's eye. Music shifts slowly enough, even at its increasing rates, to stay somewhat behind the best technical capabilities of our software. (of course, acoustic instruments are getting better and changing too, but that is a more nuanced topic, and the changes are generally more subtle there, such as Barenboim's new/old piano design.)
Paradigm Shifts
What I imagine, and what will hopefully happen before we exhaust every nook of sound synthesis, is a paradigm shift in what music is in the first place. With virtual reality and extreme leaps of so many areas of products, it's not hard to imagine the fundamental nature of music becoming more three-dimensional as well. I like to imagine interactive geometric visualizations of the sound, or journeys throughout landscapes inspired by parts of the music, but that's just a start. Perhaps even more could be accomplished.
A new Total Art?
I have not made many specific predictions on exactly what direction music will take, but hopefully I've drawn an outline of what may be possible. Essentially, I believe we will run into the obstacle of running out of new sounds relatively soon, which will only become an artistic problem some time after. Quite soon, however, I imagine music becoming more interactive and more immersive, and being combined with other types of art into an improved whole, a kind of beautiful modern Gesamtkunstwerk. I know with the increasing rate of change and growing population of the world, it will not take long to see changes in music compared to centuries ago, and I look forward to the transforming landscape of new, unexplored sonic art.
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