This isn't about accurate recreations of acoustic instruments, it's about capturing some of the features of acoustic instruments in non-imitative patches to make them sound less sterile and simplistic.
A lot of (non-MIDI) computer music is either drones, granular clouds, or percussive blips.
There's an under-explored area of articulation and musical detail between those sounds and warm, mushy analog.
The DX7 was a good first take at that. But today you can have hundreds of oscillators stacked and patched in any configuration you want instead of just six.
You can actually use thousands of oscillators, which is what Magenta did with their differentiable DSP (DDSP) approach to modeling acoustic instruments including singing:
Feels like some better instruments can help with this, over the basic keyboard. Things with polyphonic aftertouch, or electronic wind instruments, or more advanced surfaces like the Linnstrument or Continuum.
Comments
This isn't about accurate recreations of acoustic instruments, it's about capturing some of the features of acoustic instruments in non-imitative patches to make them sound less sterile and simplistic.
A lot of (non-MIDI) computer music is either drones, granular clouds, or percussive blips.
There's an under-explored area of articulation and musical detail between those sounds and warm, mushy analog.
The DX7 was a good first take at that. But today you can have hundreds of oscillators stacked and patched in any configuration you want instead of just six.
You can actually use thousands of oscillators, which is what Magenta did with their differentiable DSP (DDSP) approach to modeling acoustic instruments including singing:
https://magenta.tensorflow.org/ddsp-vst
https://magenta.tensorflow.org/ddsp
I doesn't sound realistic but it is expressive in an unusual way.
Feels like some better instruments can help with this, over the basic keyboard. Things with polyphonic aftertouch, or electronic wind instruments, or more advanced surfaces like the Linnstrument or Continuum.