Future music is not human

I believe I have found the perfect song.

It sounds different than usual song is expected to sound. There is no solo, no vocals, no hook. It prompted me to think about the future of music. Where it's heading and where it can go. (With tangents of where it should go.)

This is an opinion piece. Ye been warned.

Music has always been made by humans driving (or playing) machines (or instruments). This has been becoming more and more automated and whole concerts can be synthesized at will. Instead, people make trap music. Highly repetitive simple samples filling space only by their volume. Music is ripe for a revolution.

The technology is advancing rapidly, sound can be manipulated, inspected, and created with the utmost precision. We have all but total control over the sonic dominion.

Nostalgia or stagnation?

In the typical style of a transitional period: technology progresses, but is being taken advantage of less. Stagnation in place of experimentation. To understand what could be, we need to explore the nature of music generation first. Let's look at some aspects of the technology and explore what the opportunities for further automation are.

Physical limits

Music is structured sound. Sound is vibration of a medium (usually air), captured by ears and interpreted by mind.

When synthesizing sound on a discreet-time machine (a computer), we are limited by a chosen sampling rate - the sound we create is just a sampled representation of the real thing.

As sound is a physical phenomenon, we need to model its behavior with a model - use an approximation. On the flip side, we are not limited by what is physically possible in this world. We could disregard the Doppler shift, make sound become louder as it moves further away; taking things to the extreme: underwater drums, instruments moving at supersonic speeds, or non-euclidean recording rooms.

Human attention limits

Humans are attention optimizers, we have to be, we don't scale like machines do. A computer can be told to spend twice as much time on getting the extra 1%.

How many instruments can fit into a 3-minute track? However many you have the patience to use.

Final frontier

TODO: add a sample here (aka "check out my SoundCloud")

It would be easy to extrapolate these observations, go all doomsday, and deduce that soon we are gonna have music so advanced you will need cybernetic augments to enjoy it. Such music will certainly exist, I would not be surprised if it already does.

The vast majority of music won't evolve so dramatically. We will see more music being produced. More genres, more variations, more combinations. Music slowly approaching everyone's idea of perfection. Bespoke music, on demand.

Whatever happens, music is an art form. And it will most likely always exist in the current form. After all, more orchestral pieces are being written now than ever before.