Electronic music too synthesized??

Nosta

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Hi all, I have an assignment to do for college the title is "Is electronic music seen as being fake or too synthesized?" I need the opinions of both sides of the argument so I've come here to see what you guys think and feel..
Please feel free to write what ever you want on this topic. I would be insanely grateful for any input any of you have no matter how big or small!!
Thanks!
 
isn't that the idea behind electronic music? I feel like its supposed to be fake since you can do thing far more creative with it then you can real instruments. Of Course you use realistic aspects in electronic music but if it wasn't fake or synthesized it wouldn't be any different from any other type of music
 
I think you should smack you tutor in the mouth for asking such a dumbass question.

hold on a second there... i think this is quite a relevant question!

as a thesis, this has many options! for one, the majority of modern music is still put together in a daw and finished off with soft-synth type effects such as compressors, exciters, limiters etc... but to many only 'dance music' seems to be made in this fashion..

not to mention the fact that frum and bass is built around the sampler AND the synthesiser... it is electronic music that is purely synth that i'm not to keen on, i like that rugged sampled sound! dnb & especially jungle all feel 'natural' as it's made from a collection of 'real' instruments...


loads to explore and a good question IMHO!

and any way the question is 'is it seen as', not 'is it' and i would say that yes, a majority of people see it as synthesised but do they value it less, probably not?
 
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I think you should smack you tutor in the mouth for asking such a dumbass question.

haha for sure.

to me there is something very human or organic about electronic music which i love. electronic music is the best, you can do everything you can do with non-electronic music but with unlimited possibilities of sound design.
I feel sorry for people who dont see that.
 
Like others have said,electronic music's meant to be synthesized,that's the whole point!

In fact I'd say todays electronic music sounds less synth than it use to be. Think about the 80's pop scene, house and even the RnB with the likes of Zapp n Roger, proper synthesized electronic instruments going on.

Now as for 8bit Chiptune music, that's another matter altogether lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAnFLgThTgo
 
If you think about it, all music is synthesized, as all music is manipulated sounds to create melody and harmony. Should make no difference to the authenticity of the music whether its made by instruments or by computer>
 
hold on a second there... i think this is quite a relevant question!

as a thesis, this has many options! for one, the majority of modern music is still put together in a daw and finished off with soft-synth type effects such as compressors, exciters, limiters etc... but to many only 'dance music' seems to be made in this fashion..

not to mention the fact that frum and bass is built around the sampler AND the synthesiser... it is electronic music that is purely synth that i'm not to keen on, i like that rugged sampled sound! dnb & especially jungle all feel 'natural' as it's made from a collection of 'real' instruments...


loads to explore and a good question IMHO!

and any way the question is 'is it seen as', not 'is it' and i would say that yes, a majority of people see it as synthesised but do they value it less, probably not?

I´m with you there.For me for example acts like Pendulum or Subfocus..saying lots of Dancefloor DNB (sorry!) Acts are what I would describe as too synthesized. Many acts from eastern Europe aswell.
 
1. Electronic music being "too synthesised" is a fundamentally flawed principle as the intention is to open up new possibilites with the sounds and emotion, so what defines the "too" in the statement.
2. A lot of electronic music isn't nessacarily pure synths, if you listen to a lot of new and old dnb, there's massive amounts of sampling from wood blocks and drum kits to guitars and pianos.
3. "Electric music" is a genre, it would be a lot easier to say, "crack-step" or "lol-step" is too synthesized or whatever, but declaring everything electronic [which is practically everything these days] is too synthesized is painting everything with the same brush.
 
Why not discuss the shiteness of too much autotune being used in the popular music industry these days?
 
Why not discuss the shiteness of too much autotune being used in the popular music industry these days?

i know... whats that about? suddenly it's acceptable to be a proffesional singer who can't sing raaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh a few years back you would have been laughed out/off the stage/studio for such a heinous crime!
 
Agreed. On all the autotune stuff.

I'm not really onboard with the whole pop-music scene currently anyways. Artists like Lady GaGa are giving the public a skewed image of what EDM (or to the US mass public "Techno") is and what it's about. All these artists just want to make a fast buck so they make some trancey rip-off or (what seems to be the current trend) this electro-pop business with that Portomento synth line. There seems to be very little complexity at all to these tracks... not to mention they are all over-compressed at the end. Even the dance tracks that make it to the top of US charts usually are pure cheese house or most commonly Hands-Up Trance like Cascada. The general public wouldn't know how to act if you dropped a tech-house track in the middle of a top 40 set, (actually a glimpse of this was the interaction between Paris Hilton and Steve Angello last year. I LMAO)

Any how back to the original question, this music was founded on sounds that didn't actually exist. Go back to the early days back in Detroit where Juan Atkins decided to make his own music inspired by Kraftwerk and the like. They were using sounds that weren't found in nature, sure a sample might have been used here and there but you still have to give a lot to the electronics. Electronics have given so much to music that it's not even funny, not just in the aspects of instruments, it goes further then that: effects processors, sound editing, and I would even argue things like guitar amps. Synthesis gives us ways to make sounds that are unachievable through natural processes, thus allowing us "musical freshness" for an art that could have stagnated ages ago. Without electronics or means to apply input/send effects music would have grown stale and we would have to start creating bizarre combinations for bands (i.e. a band made up of a Bag Pipe, Congas and a Sitar) in order to make something that hasn't already been heard. If we had no reverb processing, then we would be reduced to playing our music in strange places like caves to get the sound we are looking for.

Electronic sounds can be overdone though, if you have a part for piano in your track then use a real piano or a sampler with real piano samples, don't whip one up on your favorite synth and pretend it's the same because it's not. There are just some instruments that cannot be synthesized to the same quality of the actual instrument.

I may or may not have worded this the right way but I'm sure you get my general viewpoint on the topic.
 
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