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Acoustic or Synthesized
Acoustic or Synthesized
While composing music for a video game, a question came up. Should the style be acoustic or synthesized? That is to say, should the instruments be standard acoustic instruments, or should all or most of the instruments be synthesized?
Acoustic instruments are familiar to everyone. We all have heard wind and string instruments, and we remember what they sound like. On the other hand, synthesized instruments often sound “electronic”, perhaps even robotic. But that really depends on whether the composer treats the synthesized instruments in a manner similar to acoustic instruments.
There are plenty of composers who took classical music and reframed it as electronic.
I remember listening to the a very early recording of Wendy Carlos’ 1968 production of Switched on Bach. Carlos later composed a hugely influential music score for Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie “A Clockwork Orange”. The music is intensely sinister in this scene, shown in the video here.
Isao Tomita is another favorite of mine. He composed magnificent renditions of classical music, such as Claude Debussy’s “Arabesque Number 1”, shown here. I loved this album; what a sense of humor he had! I also greatly enjoyed his synthesized arrangement of Gustav Holst’s “The Planets”.
I have no intention of arranging a classical piece of music in a synthesized format. Instead, I want to explore how one of my own pieces of music might translate from a purely acoustic instrumentation into an electronic arrangement.
Here an Armenian woodwind instrument known as a “duduk” plays the melody, accompanied by a guitar. About halfway through the piece, soft guitars rapidly strum the chords.