The fear that synthesizers used to strike into the hearts of some musicians has been illustrated once again in a recently unearthed 1983 clip from the BBC Archive.
This finds tank-topped futurist Ray Hammond and a young upstart by the name of Peter Gabriel debating the potential impact of these electronic instruments, and while they’re not exactly at loggerheads, they’re not entirely in agreement, either.
Right off the bat, Hammond is the more cynical, walking over to a chirping E-MU Emulator sampling synth and silencing it.
“A lot of people today are talking about synthesizer bands,” he says. “In fact it's a bit of a misnomer. These things are computers in the fullest sense of the word and they're capable of reproducing music from almost any source.”
Enter Gabriel, who immediately accentuates the positives of the synth.
“For me it’s something of a dream machine,” he says. “I always fantasised about something [with] which you could take any real world sound and manipulate it and put it in your music. I mean, one’s always had the possibility of doing that with tape, but it’s tremendously long-winded.”
“The thoughts and the ideas are becoming much more critical than the technique,” Gabriel goes on to add, but one thing that he and Hammond agree on is that great players will always be able to do things with their instruments that a computer can’t.
Hammond, though, fears that the synth could put musicians who are working on more formulaic music out of a job. For context, in the previous year the Musicians Union UK had actually passed a motion to ban the use of synths, drum machines and any electronic devices in a bid to protect its members.
“So much music is formula stuff… it’s formula over and over again,” he says. “And of course once it’s repititious a computer is perfect to do that over and over again.”
Warming to his theme, Hammond uses the example of drum machines: “What happens to the poor drummer?” he asks. “Session drummers were prized for their ability to turn up and be reliable and get a good sound, and so many of them now are out of work, aren’t they?”
Now in full flow, Hammond does caveat this by saying that the perhaps the “clock-watcher” session musicians who are playing “repititious and uninspired” stuff deserve to lose their jobs, while Gabriel draws the comparison with other industries that, at the time, were being transformed by the dawning of the computer age.
It’s striking, too, that many of the arguments being put forward by both men are similar to those being used in the current debate surrounding AI’s potential to change the way we make music.
“It will force people to use and develop parts of their personalities and their thought patterns that separate them from machines,” says Gabriel. Asked if using a synth constitutes cheating meanwhile, Hammond aruges: “It’s cheating, if you like, for somebody who can’t play an instrument to press a button and then the instrument plays, but who’s going to make up the melodies? Who’s going to make up the lyrics? Who’s going to sing?”
More than 40 years on, we’re happy to be able to report that songwriters and singers are still very much part of the music-making landscape. Whether we’ll be able to say the same after another four decades of technological progress remains to be seen.
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