Regarding control of modern sounds

Electronically generated music have been around for more than a century. From Léon Theremin's hand played theremin, where the player controlls the sound by manipulating the capacitance between his body and the antenna of the instrument, resulting in beating between two radio frequency oscillators) to the most modern highly evolved musical hardware, ie Elektrons Machinedrum, and the totally spaced out Eigenharp and eventually the total transitation into the software domain, with for example Native Instruments Reaktor where soundcapabilities is way beyond imagination.

The possibilities for electronic music making have exploded during the last years. But still people pay excessively high prices for the actual music hardware. The sonicly quite limited Roland SH-101 is still selled for prices well over 6000 SEK (which is probably more than it costed originally). How come?

If you ever have had the pleasure of playing a subtractive analogue synthesizer, with all the knobs, arpeggiators and such thing (or a modern equivalent) you know you quickly gets totally stunned by the high degree of control you can have. The direct feedback from the sound must be experienced to be understood.

Which are the factors for this experience? I see several factors:

• the constraing of price have forced the designers to chose a simple, yet general architechture
• a few (not many) quirks in the architechture gives important character to the instrument, which are often discussed and loved among the users (some parameter that can be driven out of range, a special distortion when driven to loud, a sinus tone coming from the resonance filter).
  
• the parameters range and scales are carefully chosen, for good precision when using the knobs and other controllers
  
• the non-chaning spatial mapping to parameters in the sound gives the possibility to predict how a sound probably will sound, which is gotten from experience.
• A fairly straight forward architechture, with not too many uncontrolled feedback loops (this is not true for modulars).
• constraint in how many tones can be played, sometimes monophone
• a very responsive instrument ("infinitley fast", low latency)
  

During the 90ties (80-talet in swedish), the digital technology came and actually destroyed most of the usability in the previous analogue instruments. This was mainly because of cost and engineering effiency. Buttons are cheaper and even easier to program than knobs (which are very analogue). However, by reducing the previously very inituitive, and organic method of shaping sound, both the model (non-inituitive FM-synthesis, wavetables) and the interface (buttons and abstract parameters and choosable models) rendered the soundprogramming to some kind of black art. The sounds were also percepted as more harsh and metallic, which is to expect because of the richer and more complex overtones.

This can be heard in the songs as well - the arrangements are more complex (because of the increased amount of polyphony and different timbres played at once), but the sound went in a sense more strict and repeating, probably beacuse the sequencers of the time made it harder to get a less perfect sound. The use of samples gave a new touch to the music, but it was still often not as organic as with the old analogue synthesizers.

After around 1994 everything went crazy, and, among others, the swedish company Clavia introduced the Nord Lead (pictured above), a digital synthesizer with analogue knobs that worked as an analogue synthesizer, and the music production changed totally again, and techno and more esoteric electronic music like did get widely spread, like.

Artists like Aphex Twin made song like Isopropohlex (in Spotify playlist), which is has a very simple "melody", but all the sounds in the song evolve very intensive. This would have been impossible to do in the 90-ties without a very large and expensive analogue modularsynthesizer.

Do you remeber the Trance music from around 2002? This evolved from the gated patterned arpeggio of the Access Virus synthesizer, which eventuallty moved straight into the software realm. Nowadays the electronic music have diffused into most of modern radio productions (Röyksopp - Girl and the robot, among many others, just look at the swedish eurovision song contest).

It's stunning to see what deep impact the music hardware (and software) have on the music created. When new features arrive, they are of course used in new creative ways, and old ways of using the instruments can get out fashion quickly.

Here is a video of the japanse artist Denkitribe using two quite small instruments (the Korg ER-1 drum machine and the Clavia Micro Modular) for a quite catchy tune.