The paradox here is that the closer you get to reality the more every little glitch sticks out. Consider the flop that the Final Fantasy full length movie turned out to be. Easily the most realistic and believable humans in CG yet, but they were so close that all their flaws glared. They didn't move quite like real people, their hair was just a touch off, etc etc. Meanwhile, everybody loves the more cartoonish stuff because all that brain hardware they've got programmed to deal with real people isn't triggered.forge wrote:maybe a bit like computer graphics in movies - it really has in the last 5 years gone from cheesy looking obviously fake cartoony animation (even star wars attack of the clones was let down by that watery planet with the clone armies - it just looked too fake by George Lucas usual standards) t5o now being able to actually create real believable stuff, and on quite a basic level - and that real suspension of disbelief is when the real fun starts
Personally I'm getting less and less excited about all the new sonic possibilities new tools bring us. You're still making music for a human listener and there's only so much the human brain can take in and appreciate at once. If you pour all your energy into the kind of timbral complexity modern tools allow you, you have to compensate by writing simpler melodies and harmonies and backing off on the rhythms a bit. You can take a Richard Devine sort of approach and pack every bar full of information at every level but I seriously doubt there's every going to be much of audience for this. A big part of the reason people can absorb the complexity of a lot of classical music is that the individual instruments are familiar enough to stay in the background of our attention.
