Uploading a dying breed of musical sounds to the cloud

The Outsiders: Continuing his series, Dan Antopolski speaks to an engineer rescuing classic sound-shaping tech from the dustbin of musical history

(Tom Ford)

In the Nineties sitcom Red Dwarf, Arnold Rimmer’s memories were uploaded onto the ship’s computer at his death and he manifested thereafter as a hologram, despite his personality not being one that most people would think to preserve. Science fiction loves this idea, that the human mind is just data that can be transferred to another medium with or without losing its humanity – movies like Tron, The Lawnmower Man and Avatar and at least two separate Black Mirror stories reflect our fascination with this question: are we finite?

One might say that our dependence on our smartphones is a step towards this uploading – we have somewhat transferred ourselves to the cloud in the form of archived photos and videos instead of active reminiscence, scheduled reminders so we don’t have to hold plans in mind – and so on. But our technology is not quite ready to slurp us entirely onto a USB stick, we are just too complicated.

Some of the things we have made, however, have been successfully recreated in the digital realm – and not a moment too soon, for things break and rust, while code is forever.

I spend an amount of my free time working (playing) with music software. Many of the programmed instruments and processing effects – reverbs, compressors and so on – are retro in style, software emulations of hardware which was commonly used in 20th-century recording studios, which left its trace in the sound of the music we all know. I am looking at an organ preset called No Woman No Cry – even before clicking on it I know what it will sound like and I can use it to reference a musical style and era, earnestly or playfully.

Great attention has been paid to the graphical interfaces. Vintage instruments and effects are rendered in textures of leather, wood, or the oily metal of a worn guitar pedal. To see them is to feel warm, analog feelings. I can trust that when I press the keys on my midi keyboard the sound that comes out will have a degree of complexity and unpredictability that will wake me up and make me want to engage creatively. And even though I am moving virtual knobs and sliders with a mouse, rather than real ones with my hands, I have a fair idea of what they all do, since the functionality has also been copied with curatorial care from the original hardware into the new code: the sound should be affected the same way.

I spoke to one of these emulators, brave software engineers who rescue the soul of the hardware that made our music possible, before it crumbles, unreproducible – and is lost to us.

Steinunn Arnardottir is director of engineering at Native Instruments, a Berlin-based company that develops music software and hardware widely used in contemporary production and performance. She spent an early part of her career coding software effects inspired by classic gear like the Echoplex Tape Delay and the E-mu SP-1200 sampler, tools that had physical limitations that created a signature sound, complete with sonic artefacts – glitches – that were often not necessarily there by design but which were accepted by musicians and listeners, then embraced and now essential.

“Whatever artefact there might be, wanted or unwanted, in a true emulation process, one would try to bring it over,” Arnardottir says, “but usually you need to bang your head on the monitor until you figure out how to copy it. There’s always something weird happening that you didn’t anticipate.”

“You can be working with a unit that was made maybe in the 1970s and it has been repaired at some point – or somebody spilled their drink over it in the 1980s. Then it got sold to another owner and repaired again but the broken component wasn’t available so they substituted something similar. So even units from the same manufacturer end up sounding different.”

While the mission, to rescue classic sound-shaping tech from the dustbin of history, is a sincere one, with sometimes a dozen software emulations of the same gear in the market it is fair to wonder if we have gone too far in so faithfully mimicking the old gear. Her more recent work at Native instruments has been not only to map the old hardware onto software but to extend its capabilities: a sampler, say, with that familiar tinny digital tone but now with more than two seconds sampling time, or a knob on an audio effect that goes up to 11 – and beyond. A respectful dialogue between the past and the future. And the degree of emulation is less slavish: “What are the desired artefacts? I am personally more a fan of asking what do people really love, rather than copying everything. And we often incorporate this into a new design interface.”

There can be resistance, even among young users, to changing some aspects of the computer interface. This might seem strange: while young users know the sounds, they may never have touched the hardware. Why might they still want to rotate a pretend knob on a computer screen, when they could achieve the effect in other, more ergonomic ways? “We take cultural references across generations,” explains Arnardottir. “Maybe it’s monkey see, monkey do,” she says, laughing. “We translate all of this complexity and take it with us for reasons we don’t even know.”

How the next generations of users will shape the development of the tools is hard to predict. Will they retain and transmit forward a sense of connection with how the emulated gear relates to different types of music? Or will tape saturation, vinyl crackle and even MP3 compression be just a flat selection of vintage effects, applied quite casually like Instagram filters?

“You always turn yourself into a future joke when you try to predict the future,” warns Arnardottir cheerfully. That may be – but this I do know: when my mind is uploaded and can be instantiated as a plugin, it won’t take up much Ram – most of me is already on my phone.