I’ve thought about this a lot, and I don’t think the future lies in new instruments. I think the innovation, given the amount of horsepower we have in modern computers, is going to be in using layering and effects to create new sounds (and I think it already has). The fact that with a gaming PC you can layer 5 softsynths and route them to unheard of effects chains and resample their outputs in novel ways has greatly facilitated musical decision making.
Additionally, I think in the future musical decision making will interplay more with intelligent and distributed agents. I think there’s a lot of work to be done in playing electronic music over networks in a high-bandwidth way where everyones clock is synced. Jacktrip begins to do it, but the results are often “academic” sounding. A good intelligent agent would provide interesting musical choices given input. I think this kind of synthesis between man and machine is the future of music, not some variation of analog/FM/wavetable synthesis.
I was never one for 94 but this sounds really good.
To me, MPE expressiveness + modular (specifically a combination of virtual and hardware modular in a hybrid setup) is pointing the way forward.
In the history of electronic music so far, there’s been two paths:
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Relatively one-dimensional or two-dimensional discrete human control over sound directly by the musician: turning knobs, pressing keys with varying velocity, aftertouch, mod wheel, step sequencing. Direct human interaction with the machine. You push a button, you tweak a knob, stuff happens. Immediate and direct, capable of sounding “instrument-like”, a soul operating behind the cold electronics, but if you want to make it sound more complex you’ll have to do some sound design. Set up envelopes to make a smooth rise and fall motion, LFOs to make it breathe, parameter locking of drum machines for fluid changing rhythms, etc. Synth pop, kosmische, classic techno, industrial, etc.
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Classic “generative” sound design: modular synthesis, west coast, virtual modular instrument design including Pure Data, Max, Reaktor. Introducing degrees of randomness, chaos, uncertainty, conditional events. Machine learning (this is still in its infancy but will get crazy in next 10 years). Autechre is the classic example, but also people like Morton Subotnick, Suzanne Ciani, Keith Fullerton Whitman who set up huge self-evolving modular patches and prune those patches in various ways to introduce human control. Ceding your control to a Buchla that seems to have a mind of its own, etc. Still relatively one-dimensional control - insert a patch cable, turn a knob, pressure sensitive touchplate - but you can set up crazy generative programmatic processes so that a single one-dimensional interaction completely changes everything and sets the machine on a new trajectory. It’s seen interest here and there, the 70s (analog modular), 90s IDM (going full on digital with Max and Reaktor and Renoise), then fell off for a bit in favor of 80s synth pop nostalgia etc., but there’s been a major interest in this over the past decade.
FUTURISTIC:
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More recently there’s promise in realizing that analog snobbery will only take you so far, and that analog combined with digital will take you far. In 2018 in particular we have the most exciting way I’ve ever seen to take modular as far as you’d like to go - with VCV rack and a DC-coupled interface, and with DAWs becoming increasingly modular friendly (Bitwig; Ableton 10 with Max For Live out of the box), you have all the parts of analog hardware modular, digital hardware modular, MIDI controllers, and the near-infinite possibilities of digital software modular all inter-operating with a minimum of headaches, “it just works”. For the first time, it feels like everything is really coming together in an easy and accessible way. Programmatic sound boxes like Organelle (particularly its new Orac capabilities) and recently Norns add another layer, and those allow the likes of PureData, Supercollider, etc. to play with the rest of this generative setup with MIDI CC and direct CV communication (Norns will apparently have this with the upcoming Crow eurorack module.)
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The relatively one-dimensional control over sound parameters throughout the history of human interaction with electronic music is really starting to change with MPE and multi-dimensional OSC, etc. The Soundplane, Roli blocks, Expressive E Touche, Linnstrument, BopPad, etc. are introducing multi-dimensional polyphonic expression into electronic music at an increasingly affordable level, and making it very easy to assign all of those dimensions to various parameters of what you’re working on. For the first time, it feels like you can express yourself in electronic music in the way that a violinist is capable of expressing herself - with a real, infinitely subtle and nuanced instrument that reacts in deep ways to your physical control.
When you combine #3 and #4 and get MPE multi-dimensional polyphonic control over endlessly generative hybrid hardware/software modular setups, you get the best of #1 and #2 - complex human “soul-like”, deep instrument-like interaction and direct control over complex generative self-evolving programmatic music.
Once people get a firm grasp on what they can do in this sphere, things are going to sound very different. The old ways of how we think electronic music should sound are going to go out the window, and it’ll simultaneously have organic intention and human performance and Autechre-level algorithmic intricacy.
I personally haven’t heard much music like this yet. I can mostly only hear it in my head, not on records. But if we want to talk truly futuristic, in the proper sense of “here’s what music technology is capable of that we’ve barely scratched the surface of so far”, that’s where all the excitement is for me.
This Essential Mix by Mr C, beamed back 1000 years from the year 3002, has always felt pretty futuristic
I’m pretty sure Richard himself was beamed back from the year 2987 to 1987, on the orders of Mad Mike and the rest of UR to rise up and spread militant love and unity to all.
DAMN this track slaps
yea kramphaft got the slappers
Gábor Lázár, Air Max '97, Second Woman, Jung An Tagen, Gajek, Lanark Artefax, Pan Daijing, Lorenzo Senni, M.E.S.H., Jlin, Rashad Becker, Antwood, Zuli, Renick Bell etc…
That’s a good question given that it seems like we’re living through 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange and The Illuminatus! Trilogy all in real time.
This opening melody sounds like the future to me. I remember hearing this when the release was fresh and I thought “holy shit, the future is going to be amazing and we’re going to drive it…”
This track, to me at least, was emblematic of the optimism of the coming interconnected world. I’ve been dying to hear Uwe Schmidt’s opinions regarding this release in retrospect. It was prophetic yet the social dynamic of interconnectedness has become mostly a huge disappointment I feel, as people use it for distractions instead of problem solving.
PS, I’d be eternally grateful for a PM of Uwe’s contact details.
As I was contemplating what I listen to that I would consider futuristic, I started to see that it’s really about what comes off as sounding or seeming timeless. Björk Vespertine still seems fresh whenever I revisit it and it’s almost 17 years old now! I also believe it works both ways because you can have a modern record that mimics older music and does it well enough that it will seem timeless.
Agreed. I think Homogenic occupies a special space as well, maybe more so if one understands the context of contemporary releases at the time. Much of Homogenic was done with a MPC2000.
Absolutely, I read an article not too long ago about Homogenic and how crazy it is when measured against the contemporary records of the day, and again whenever I listen to it I’m still blown away. Edit:(here’s the article https://www.stereogum.com/1963786/homogenic-turns-20/franchises/the-anniversary/)
I’m thinking I may have to weird out my younger coworkers tomorrow with a Björkathon
I think the Waldorf Quantum is a good example of a ”futuristic” synth.
To me, futuristic music has no 12TET tunings nor familiar 4/4 rhytms… So it will not be popular any decade soon 
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Syl Kougai’s ΙΧΘΥΣ is the most futuristic album I can think of.
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IMO music from the future would be found on SoundCloud more than on Spotify
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Without necessarily sounding futuristic per se, the collective I play with is constantly trying to explore instinctively uncharted territories, in a forward thinking manner. I wonder where we’ll stand in a few years but we’ll definitely not sound the same nor like any past band, I guess.
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Going modular lately, I totally understand why this sounded futuristic in the 70s, and still naturally gives birth to experimental music today.
To heck with that! I’m living in Back to the Future pt 2(the good part- with hoverboards).
Agree +1, when we talk about future, it inherently includes everything that has preceeded, everything that has survived.
I think quite a bit about the future, and, even the possible theory of the Future dictating the Past. It takes another type of thinking beyond binary. I feel that things are eventually, even past this Age going organic, when all machinery both natural and artificial share information and method. (A glimpse of the future is rooted in the past.)
There seems to be a narrowing, a unifying principle. The present is very much concerned with exploration and exhange of information and pushing boundaries, I would say the purpose is to arrive again at a larger mutual boundary, which is going to be hightened by our common interest in basic survival.
So, as far as music and instrumentation, I always pictured a techno-tribal society: the overriding context going back to primitive ritual and ceremony in a world even hyper-socialized and structured out of necessity. I do not think there will be many new musical inventions, but tech augmentations to ones that have carried strings, or made of wood, metal, etc., electro-acoustics, new methods of stimulating the air, moving it, perhaps even directly to neurons…
Plus, there may be new materials, too, or genetic alteration of materials and highly personalized, interchangable components- think the modular industry going mass scale, customized printed components on the cheap.
It is more likely in the near future it will be more common to sell ideas/schemes and fabrication to consumers than actually set up shop. I am just not seeing too many Apples in the future, I suppose there will always be some, but I am semi-inspired by the tech malls in China, with the plethora of copies, and parts and young people hacking away and the demystification of tech. We are all simply going to HAVE to be programmers, and necessity requires decentralization.
Add with this AI and biotech, and computing on the atomic scale/optics, our own bodies will again have a new “sacred” meaning. But, again, an ethics of tech will have be the final say, as the present cause of invention “just because we can” will seem irresponsible and regressive.
So, in my mind what will be most important is not HOW it will be played, but WHY, which will reflect a paradigm after all knowable knowledge and power has been acquired.
Interesting point of view, @MixedSignals…
May I ask use your words in my next gig ? I was looking for a similar text…
Btw, Blade Runner is still future to me, when a lot of other imagined futures have decayed to some clichés…
How artists’ projections shape our vision of future?
Sure, why not!
I don’t necessarily think artists in general have power to shape, which suggests a type of control- maybe- but instead drawing out the mass subconscious that is already there.