The Future of Music (not: of the Music Business)

[PlainSongs]

This question pops into my head on occasions, such as breakfast this morning:

What will music be like in 25 years time, in 50, in 100?

Anything beyond that (if not those intervals already) seems too speculative; what will the world look like by then in the first place...

Note the thread title: this isn't about the music business, indy recording etc. Can be related, but I'm mainly wondering about the actual sounds.

• A Beethoven or Mozart might have blinked a few times hearing the possibilities of music developed in the 20th century. Or would they?
• Are there still enough unexplored (and accessible and exciting) areas in music to get a similar proliferation in the decades to come?
• Like what?
• Or will we get mainly retro movements, hybrid forms, and perhaps extensions of the music experience beyond the realm of composition (interactive music, generative music, full listen-smell-feel-taste-see experiences)?
• What about globalization/localization of musical style?
• Will mankind and technology explore new auditory sensations so sophisticated that they render the past obsolote, or will vocal cords and a box with strings never quite seem caveman-like?

If you're thinking it's all a stupid wild guess: think of it not as predicting the future but making plans for it!

Let's hear your visionary thoughts. Kid about but thoughtful ideas might be cool too!

[Billy's Little Trip]

I'd have to guess that music will always be around in it's natural form because it's a natural occurrence. Singing, rhythm, melody, beat. There will always be new ways of performing it, packaging it, seeing it, hearing it, but in the end, it always will come back to it's natural state.

[ujnhunter]

Buzzkill: The World will end in 2012... so there will be no music.

just kidding... well I guess it could end... guess we'll have to wait and see...

[signboy]

The human voice, at least, will never die out. Anything with no vocals at all is either: 1- not relatable and fails over time, or 2- categorized as instrumental and listened to with minimal vigor.

I listen to NIN's Ghosts album quite a bit, but always in the background while I'm doing something else. I realizeI'm being a bit of an ass, but I'm picking a side and sticking to it just for fun's sake. I have no way in my theory to explain Tchaikovsky.

Music, though, WILL continue to evolve. Mostly in the ways of new sounds and new means of musician input. Guitar will be replaced with midi as soon as the potential for expressiveness is there. In 2029, just before skynet nukes us all, I'm going to get a Ray Kurzweil designed implant that generates music with fractals and logrithms that change with my endorphins. Combine that with an implant that induces synesthesia, and the ability to route my vision to a holographic projector, and live shows will be cool again.

Small ideas for now though...
what about a theremin that has an adjustable portamento and a built in seqencer a la Reason's Thor? Or a fretless bass where the fingerboard is actually a touchscreen midi controller?

Maybe I need to go back to bed. I'm not even hung over yet.

[roymond]

Perhaps in another 100 years the public will embrace 20th century classical music,as "Contemporary" classical music is rarely popular.

Technology-based (or influenced) instruments will continue to emerge over time and introduce musical textures we haven't considered.

World music fusion will continue to evolve.

Musical interpretation of data will continue to evolve (such as the shift of ultra-sonic waveforms into the audible range), and statistical data may well play a role in composition not unlike the 12 tone constructs of the early 20th century.

"Music is the best" - F Zappa

[frankie big face]

Perhaps in another 100 years the public will embrace 20th century classical music,as "Contemporary" classical music is rarely popular.

I doubt it. I have a (rather long) theoretical rant about this very subject, where I posit that recording technology killed the evolution of classical music by making it possible for audiences to stay home and listen to Beethoven rather than go out and be subjected to Berg. In order for orchestras to put people in the hall, they had to play what people want to hear (i.e. Beethoven) and they stopped challenging themselves and their audiences by playing new music. (Would anyone ever have accepted late Beethoven if local orchestras kept playing Mozart?) Composers in turn stopped writing for the public and started writing for each other, making their music even less accessible and desirable than ever before and the rest is history. Check out any major symphony's concert schedule and you are likely to see a lot of Mahler (who seems to be the "flavor of the month" in the classical world, where months last for years), who hasn't written a thing for nearly a hundred years. Sure, you'll see the occasional John Adams piece, maybe something by Alan Hovhaness or Avro Part (they love him, because his music sounds so old it's new!), but only if it's sandwiched between Dvorak and Saint-Saens. My guess is that in 100 years, the classical music world will be really into......(thinking, calculating)........I don't know, maybe Ives. But mostly Beethoven.

[erik]

[*]Are there still enough unexplored (and accessible and exciting) areas in music to get a similar proliferation in the decades to come?

No. Every exciting form of music has been created already. I've seen the master list.

[Billy's Little Trip]

[*]Are there still enough unexplored (and accessible and exciting) areas in music to get a similar proliferation in the decades to come?

No. Every exciting form of music has been created already. I've seen the master list.

Negative sarcasm always puts a positive chuckle in my loins.

[Mostess]

My guess is that in 100 years, the classical music world will be really into......(thinking, calculating)........I don't know, maybe Ives. But mostly Beethoven.

Ha ha. Even Ives will have been a flash in the pan. Except maybe Symphony 2 (isn't that the one with 2 conductors?) because it's a big production. Wagner will still get good play, as will Mahler and Beethoven. Of the current moderns, I bet Glass ("Einstein on the Beach") will still be around. Opera will survive. Because musicians and listeners love bombast and excess. I actually heard Handel's "Messiah" on the radio this morning! Who the hell thought anyone was hankering for that in the middle of July? But it's brassy and hummable and fortissississimo. Those will never go out of style.

But I'm betting culture will start getting smaller, and more people will love their hometown bands/orchestras/composers/etc. more than they love the big, national/global stars. In 100 years, the catalogue of recorded music will be so vast, that no one can really complain about not having access to what they want to hear. Like sports, music will become what it traditionally was prior to the commercial recording industry: something lots of people do for fun in small groups and sometimes at the city or state level.

As for what musicological features will be common in the music of 2108? That's a sucker's game. I'd put my money on good old Western diatonicism surviving intact, maybe even reverting back from the equal temperment. The song form will still be the music of the people, with romance and impressive heroic tales remaining the most common themes. But other than that, all bets are off. Especially for "serious" or "art" music, or whatever the hardcore egghead composers of the future call their genre. Fashion in slow motion.

Although if technology keeps chugging along, two things in Western art music are certain: 1) some strange advance in nanotech or material science will create an acoustic musical instrument with some crazy properties that will instantly become fashionable for composers and orchestras and 2) that instrument will just as quickly become passe and get booed out of the orchestra hall, becoming a cheap street instrument and the foundation of a new low-brow genre that will eventually become a respectable musical tradition in its own right.

[pegor]

In the next few years music will have been reduced to repetitive inane chants backed by a symphony of ringtones. Backup musicians will play mobile phones. Only cute vagely ethnic girls will be accepted as qualified chanters.

The west will see a huge migration of people from the WWIII ravaged middle east. This will lead to modality of the chants becoming more middle eastern .

The holllywood industrial complex will continue be a force all over the world. Inserting their product into every part of daily life. Leading to the ring tones becoming sampled catch phrases from Movies and TV.

The future of music is praycall flavored chick rap over a backing track of Adam Sandler quotes.

[roymond]

In the next few years music will have been reduced to repetitive inane chants backed by a symphony of ringtones. Backup musicians will play mobile phones. Only cute vagely ethnic girls will be accepted as qualified chanters.

Then Thomas Dolby has a certain future.

[frankie big face]

...a symphony of ringtones.

Actually, this comment makes me think maybe the hottest-selling item of the future will be noise-canceling headphones with nothing on the other end. I reckon this world is going to become a damn noisy place over the next 20 years or so.

[HeuristicsInc]

I listen to NIN's Ghosts album quite a bit

Ha! I'm listening to that RIGHT NOW (specifically 23 Ghosts III).

For my collaboration with Starfinger, I came up with the name Brainpipe because that was my future musical invention that will take the music you hear in your head and record it directly into audio without having to play instruments or any of that messy stuff. Is that plausible? Yeah, maybe, but probably not
-bill

PS Mmmm now it's 24 Ghosts III, this one is awesome

[rone rivendale]

In 5 years, the biggest fad will be Roneing. People like William Shatner will be #1 on the billboard charts.

But seriously, I could see traditional instruments being obselete within another 25 years. Everything will become computerized. And with the growing numbers of ppl on the net producing music there won't be the same big musicians/bands that we have now. It'll be vastly oversaturated which isn't a bad thing. We won't buy an album cuz we like the person and think he/she/them are 'cool' we'll actually buy albums based on the content of the music.

[Spud]

People like William Shatner will be #1 on the billboard charts.

We won't buy an album cuz we like the person and think he/she/them are 'cool' we'll actually buy albums based on the content of the music.

'splain, please.

[Eric Y.]

my future musical invention that will take the music you hear in your head and record it directly into audio without having to play instruments or any of that messy stuff. Is that plausible?

Absolutely it is. I mean, they're making great strides nowadays with computers and brain activity -- like, being able to manipulate a computer just by moving your eyes, and those experiments where they have connected a robot arm to a monkey's brain and they are able to pick things up just by thinking about it...

I don't doubt that in 50, 100 years what you are talking about will be a very real possibility. PS...

[PlainSongs]

Good ideas folks.

No. Every exciting form of music has been created already. I've seen the master list.

Notice the question that came right after: Like what? Tell us? The question was half-rhetorical; but half-serious. There's human creativity. But could we rapidly have explored a large part of the sounds that people actually enjoy listening to in the 20th c?

'Classic contemporary' as well as experimental rock seems chock-full of new theories and technology, but it has few listeners. Like modern paleontology, it doesn't appeal as directly as the first T-rex or Diplodocus. And the number of that kind of big splashes doesn't have to be infinite. Until you get a Jurassic Park style breakthrough maybe. Realistic?

[Edit: The space of enjoyable lyrics seems more infinite though, as new subject matter comes up all the time.]

The space of enjoyable sounds expands by patching up your basic human ("Singing, rhythm, melody, beat") with technology, with sophisticated information, with drugs.

There's a lot of room left for hybrid tunes; how many Western musicians really know anything about say Chinese or Arabic music? & the reverse. Random fads could resurface periodically. I guess you could get a whole fad out of a certain new beat - like what though. And if as Mostess predicts music will become (is becoming?) like sports with lots of amateurs, it may be more about reinventing the wheel locally and imperfectly (Songfight! ?) than about new world wheels.

Novel social conditions may lead to novel music, or at least booms in appreciation of kinds of music. Sort of as with punk in the 70s. Electronic and directly brain-affecting march music around WWIII and/or ... something else ... for the Big Peaceful Balance.

Bill's Brainpipe will lead the way in the appreciation of imperfect musical thoughts.

And yes it may all be to the background of "praycall flavored chick rap".


BTW Frankie, interesting theory. Recording technology didn't affect the evolution of popular music in a similar fashion at all.

[rone rivendale]

People like William Shatner will be #1 on the billboard charts.

We won't buy an album cuz we like the person and think he/she/them are 'cool' we'll actually buy albums based on the content of the music.

'splain, please.

Gladly.

Since the popular style in the future will be 'Roneing', who is the most famous person right now who does that style? William Shatner.

As far as the 2nd comment I just meant people will have so many different artists at their disposal that it won't matter who is famous or popular or underground. And yes that contridicts what I said in the first paragraph but that was a joke.

[roymond]

BTW Frankie, interesting theory. Recording technology didn't affect the evolution of popular music in a similar fashion at all.

I assume this is sarcasm

[PlainSongs]

BTW Frankie, interesting theory. Recording technology didn't affect the evolution of popular music in a similar fashion at all.

I assume this is sarcasm :)

Nope, just a juxtaposition. Not sure Frankie's theory is correct, but it could be. Then the question is why didn't the same thing happen in popular music. A couple of reasons suggested themselves but my post had gotten long already and it'd get a bit off-topic.

[roymond]

BTW Frankie, interesting theory. Recording technology didn't affect the evolution of popular music in a similar fashion at all.

I assume this is sarcasm

Nope, just a juxtaposition. Not sure Frankie's theory is correct, but it could be. Then the question is why didn't the same thing happen in popular music. A couple of reasons suggested themselves but my post had gotten long already and it'd get a bit off-topic.

I think there's plenty of similar effects on popular music, even when you think about piano rolls. Popular music was performed live in the parlor by regular people, then piano rolls and other early recording devices took a lot of that away. From Faure through cabaret music through Bartok bringing eastern European melodies into the mix and the 1900 Paris Worlds Fair even...I guess a lot has to do with access and exposure, but technology certainly plays a huge role in that. What did happen to pop music was the rise of super stars touring at the level they do today, but this also is largely due to promotional techniques and recordings.

This is all a bit half baked, but interesting, nonetheless.

[frankie big face]

BTW Frankie, interesting theory. Recording technology didn't affect the evolution of popular music in a similar fashion at all.

I assume this is sarcasm

Nope, just a juxtaposition. Not sure Frankie's theory is correct, but it could be. Then the question is why didn't the same thing happen in popular music.

It kinda did. When was the last time you went out to hear a big band (of the jazz sort)? As fidelity increased and record players became affordable, bands like that gave way to small jazz combos. Soon it was no longer economically feasible to make a living playing in a big band. Sagging interest may have played a role, but you get the drift. Something similar happened with composers like Stravinsky. Look at the size of the orchestra and cast for his bombastic ballet scores like Petrushka, The Firebird and Le Sacre. By the end of the decade, he was staging pieces like A Soldier's Tale and Agon because they were small, portable and cheap!

How about folk music? In the old days, this music was passed on from generation to generation via live performance. Now, we learn about it by listening to recordings and the evolution of the genre has all but halted. Again, styles change, but this was music that existed for a very long time before dying a swift death around the time that recordings became cheap and accessible.

I am going to assume for the sake of this discussion that when you say "pop music," you mean the pop music of the 1950s and later. You are right: this music did not suffer under the hand of recording technology because it was built on the foundation of recording science. Elvis is Elvis because of the microphone. That was his instrument and there is no way he could have generated his style without one. Electric instruments like the guitar and pop organs seem tailor-made for the recording studio so it makes sense that electric pop music would benefit from the technology and not suffer from it as acoustic-based music, like Classical and traditional jazz, folk and blues did.