Are things like neural links going to make musical instruments obsolete?

This is a double edge sword!!! As much as I would love to be able to recall the music exactly the way I learned to love it, I hope that NOBODY ever stops using the instruments as that could kill the ability of the total recall!!!

I doubt anyone except the most gifted musical prodigies could imagine even a single musical instrument in its true depth, with every little quirk tickled out of it by subtle manipulation through a musician’s hands, let alone a whole ensemble.
You would get a crude approximation at best.

You have to feel the instrument , not just hold it.

Phonographic recording, synthesizers, and digital sampling were predicted to make live performances obsolete. They have not.

Though they have made live performers less necessary. Pianos and even organs were much more common in American middle-class homes before phonographs and radio made music more easily accessible.

So I say not obsolete, just more rare. Similar to the way horses are no longer essential tools, but they are still available.

Huh? No.

You know what works really well to translate thoughts into motions? Healthy nervous systems and bodies. You know what lets someone play a musical instrument as well as a musician with an instrument? A healthy human nervous system and body, taking thousands of hours of practice, plus musical talent.

There’s no reason to expect that a mechanical brain interface is going to be better than a human musician.

I was pretty sceptical about the possibility you described, but after looking into it more, it’s not that far-fetched.

I’m looking forward to listening to an orchestra of musicians using nothing but Brain-Computer interfaces. Maybe they’ll be controlling robots to physically play the instruments.

If I were to ever have a neural implant that would allow me to play the music in my head over the speakers for all to hear, I’d still not be able to carry a tune.

The thing with musical instruments is one can really never master them. It is well beyond the combination of notes.
As a guitar and piano player, who has ever mastered even just those instruments? Does Jimmy Page play different than Stevie Ray Vaughn? Yet you can tell their sound after 4 bars. There is touch and feel and tone well beyond the notes strung together. How a three piece band puts them together and plays off each others vibes. Then there is all instruments in the orchestra playing together in that combination.
Think about a Grateful Dead concert and how Bob and Jerry played. each as one, but one leading the other to a surprise that the other never even knew.
Then there is the audience.

GREAT answers everyone. Thanks.

I know that currently there are (I’ll call them DJs,) that use machines to record one sound.
Then they use the machine/computer to change the sound in almost limitless ways. Essentially, they can take a word or even a sound, and make a whole song out of the one sound being manipulated.
I hope that makes sense. I don’t fully understand the technology, and honestly don’t care for such electronic stuff.
Unquestionably, I support the playing of music on actual instruments and singing by an actual voice.

But the modern world is all about doing things we couldn’t before. It’s both easier and much harder to make music available to a worldwide audience now.

Past artists like “Beck,” essentially play several instruments, and arrange the multiple recorded instruments into one song.

It’s common for one person to use looping, foot pedals, and computers to make spontaneous music. I’ve seen lots of guys with a guitar, keyboard/synthesizer, and arrays of pedals and switches make some great live performances.

People get plastic surgery, to look younger/better.
People prefer weight loss pills, to healthy diet and exercise.
People take steroids, instead of naturally working to get stronger.

It’s hard for me to believe that people who could potentially reproduce or produce whatever sounds they wished by simply thinking about it, would bother to learn an instrument.

Wulf. You can’t play songs in your head? I can play tens of thousands of songs perfectly in my head. I can add, or remove sound. No volume control…
I often think of something I’m planning to try on guitar, before playing it. I just have to tell my fingers how to manipulate the strings.
Hypothetically. If I could just think the music, it would be far easier than thinking about how to move each finger, and all the coordination involved.

Most pop stars are pretty similar, in that their music is typically not very advanced.
They gain fans with catchy/simple bass lines, and being attractive and dancing.

The “Spice Girls” had 5 singers.
None played instruments, and they even had back up vocalists.

Pop, trumps talent in popularity.
In many cases.

I could imagine a young attractive person, with the hypothetical technology growing very wealthy as a worldwide pop star.

Currently. You can’t get away from some songs. Others, you have to dig out of the internet.
“Candy Rat” guitarists, are a great example. You will NEVER see those people in 50,000 seat arenas. Despite their talent.

@MrGrimm888 To me, the songs in my head sound perfect. Yet when they come out, I find out they are not. I’ve played piano and cello in my time and can recognize when something is out of tune and I have heard myself sing what I thought was pretty solidly…until I hear it on playback. Don’t be so sure what you hear in your head is perfect.

None of that stops me from loving music, though.

^But, the idea is that you could make a speaker play how it sounds to you. You/nobody would have to express it with a physical instrument or voice.

“But the modern world is all about doing things we couldn’t before.”
– No.
– That’s more like the folly of modernist technological thinking.

There are microplastics in human embryos now. How about we not do things just because they’re new things to do?

It might be the first time in history that the senior population
can’t complain about kids loud music on the street.

Just because there’s electronic music, some of it good, doesn’t make actual musical instruments obsolete. At least, not for all types of music appreciation.

And, it doesn’t require a mental musical interface.

I’m sure there will, however, be some mental musical interfaces, if there aren’t already, which can be combined with other electronic music composition software, sure.

Nothing’s going to make “obsolete” a good violin played by a good human player, except from a primitive perspective.

There are many people with primitive perspectives, or bizarre/lacking aesthetics, though. The kind of people who love to embrace new tech solutions to everything, just because.

@Zaku I started this thread, because I am afraid of instruments becoming extinct.
How well are people doing right now, that sell hardback sets of encyclopedias?

Technology changes demand.
In a modern society, I can see instruments becoming too expensive to be profitable.
If everyone can buy a music implant or whatever, I see sales and eventually production slowing to a point where musical instruments are only seen in pictures…

Change is inevitable.
Whether we like it, or not.

I mean, this world could look SO different in 10–20 years. Much will change.

To me, this is a legitimate concern. I wish I had a way of stopping it.

Playing guitar or flute or trumpet are far more carbon neutral than anything electric/electronic.

@MrGrimm888 Surely you can see that hardback encyclopedia sets are not at all a parallel for musical instruments! No?

You say you are afraid of instruments becoming extinct . . . but you are also pushing a narrative that they’re in danger of that. Do you tend to generate conversations that what you fear is going to happen, on other topics?

Does some part of you “get something” for fueling drama about things you fear?

^I can’t honestly say.
I guess I was hoping for something I hadn’t thought of.
I was only attempting to “fuel” conversation. Apologies.

New technology is often met with fear, or at least skepticism. For example, when Robert Moog’s synthesizer was first introduced in the 1960’s, there was fear that it could put live musicians out of work. In the 1980’s, there was a similar fear that digital sampling technology would be harmful to the careers of “serious” or “real” musicians. Now both these technologies, or derivative equivalent s, are essential tools for many artists, used to enhance rather than to replace creativity.

Personally, I think that any technology that enables artistic expression is good. But as an artist myself, I also am acutely aware of the difference between artistic success and commercial success.

The only thing that could make this work, is if there is an AI interpreting your thoughts, and generating the output, like nVidia’s canvas, which can turn scribbles into photorealistic images. But then everything would sound generic, because it can only generate the type of sounds that it was trained on.

@ragingloli AI is being used to analyse and interpret the brain waves more accurately than before, but I think the idea is not that the AI produces those sounds, but that you could literally play sounds with the mind as if you were playing a musical instrument.

There’s probably some scope for your idea where another AI could take your thoughts as a sort of prompt and process some crudely imagined tune into something orchestral.

That is just my point: All that exists in your mind are crude vestiges, mere hazy approximations of reality, like a shimmering Fata Morgana in the desert.
It does not matter if the technology can completely faithfully output what you imagine in your head, when the input is, and can only be, of low quality.

@ragingloli You’re underestimating the tech a bit. There are “brain-computer interfaces”: a device you wear on your head that reads your brain waves, and you control your brain waves, and the brain waves are calibrated to some output.

The output can be well defined, like making something move in a particular direction on a screen, or playing a specific note.

The limitation of the tech was that the brain waves were kind of fuzzy and hard to interpret, so the output would sometimes be not what was consciously desired. But now there’s development of AI that “learns” what the brain waves are and produces more accurate outputs, increasing the fidelity more.

I like that some have brought up the synthesizer.
Invented circa 1964, it developed into a instrument that could essentially replicate any other instrument.

They did not replace bands.

However.
There are people who use synthesizers as a one man band, while they provide vocals.

It’s possibly far cheaper than some instruments (a neuro-link.)
If they were mass produced, it would likely be cheaper than a nice “real” instrument….