FM has been charting advances in music-making tech for 30 years. Based on what we’ve seen, let’s make some predictions for the future
Over the past 30 years, we’ve been first-hand witnesses to a lot of changes in the ways we make music. Having spent much of this 30th anniversary issue taking stock of where we’ve been, let’s take a punt at guessing where we’re going. What will music technology look like in 30 years’ time? In 2052 we may well be laughing at everything that we got wrong…
Everything, everywhere
A recurring trend throughout the development of music tech has been a slow march toward simplified connectivity. Through the introduction of MIDI, downsizing of audio interfaces, the implementation of things like Firewire, Thunderbolt, USB-C and Bluetooth, over the past few decades it’s become far simpler to get the various devices in your studio to talk to one another, and those connections are all-round faster and more reliable.
It’s hardly an outlandish bet to predict that studio connectivity is only going to become further simplified in the future. Most likely the bulk of those pesky wires will start to disappear completely. Wireless MIDI is already a fairly common, if not yet ubiquitous, feature in our studios, and wireless audio is pretty much standard for home speakers and consumer headphones. Right now, wireless audio isn’t quite up to scratch for studio use – the latency it introduces is problematic, and quality can be variable – but we can’t be far off the technology catching up with music-making needs.
Our prediction, however, is that the potential of wireless connectivity is going to go even further. Not only will the future see us being able to control and record synths, recording gear and effects within our studio, but it will let us access our full music making setup wirelessly from anywhere. Simply open up your laptop or tablet, and access your full set of projects, library of sounds, and all of your studio gear from anywhere.
This even opens up the idea of remotely working in famous or noteworthy studios anywhere in the world without having to set foot in them. Or being able to make music remotely using a collection of classic instruments stored on the other side of the planet.
Capture the sound in your head
Machine learning is already being used to do some incredibly interesting things in the music making realm. Take the intelligent ‘assistant’ tools in iZotope’s plugins, for example, which can make impressively usable mixing decisions tailored to your music through smart analysis of incoming audio.
Similarly, tools like Hit’n’Mix’s RipX are using smart analysis of audio files in order to break mixed tracks down into their component elements. This is the same s
