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Very smart and admirable for taking a risk. When you look at what Kia has done with their cars in the last decade, they really are an ascendent company. I go o

Very smart and admirable for taking a risk. When you look at what Kia has done with their cars in the last decade, they really are an ascendent company. I go on about Yamaha as a company a bit, but when I saw this, I saw a future Yamaha level of design. Cars are just rolling smartphones now anyway, and even if this instrument becomes a loss leader, it may move Kia from a car company to a lifestyle brand. The pink noise stuff is more interesting than the woo implied by it, since it's the basis for lofi beats, and ambient/minimalist music in general is arguably hitting a new crest probably not seen since the early 90s. I just paid an unreasonable amount of money for tickets to see Olafur Arnalds, and saw a symphony do a Philip Glass premire just the other week. The old musique concrete concept was full of pretentious silliness, but the core idea of 'music as an experience' seems to be blooming just now. If you listen to electronic music and DJs, a lot of it is ephemeral, and this Kia instrument for personal sound design seems like a tool for that same experiential music. Their appeal to science on this one is neither here nor there for me, but I've done some reading on the topic to support my own music experients. These were the papers that I used to justify buying more VCOs for my modular rig, and they may be on to something: meta analysis of effect of binaural beats on cognition, anxiety: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-018-1066-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-018-1066-8 effect of binaural beats for asmr effects on sleep: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6900908/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6900908/ Worst case, it's a spectacular flop, a bunch of them end up going for pennies on ebay, and a few years later some poor kids somewhere pick them up and use them the way they did the Roland 303.

emptysongglass 5y ago
> The old musique concrete concept was full of pretentious silliness This is really cruel to the very smart, creative people and quite a lot of spirited women who led that movement. Éliane Radigue's works alone are a monumental achievement in music. The entire power electronics and noise genres owe a huge debt to the pioneers of musique concrete. They were playing with new media and giving voice to the industry of cities. I don't see anything pretentious or silly there.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  J'accuse aside, and while (later) minimalism and experimental stuff are favourite genres of mine (incl. Derbyshire, Carlos, Velvet Underground, and TG), and I do like some artists who happen to be women, I thought musique concrète was more an artifact of criticism and not the expression of musical competence and technique. Cruelty to me is the cynicism of having open minded and generous audiences sit through self indulgent performance art and then telling them it's redemption for their anxiety about being provincial and unsophisticated. Always struck me as a mean trick. However, maybe it's my bias, as if modern power electornics and noise musicians owed me a debt, I would probably write it off.
whycombinetor 5y ago
I think you're missing the point, it's freely downloadable as a standalone windows/mac executable and that's the entire product. There's no physical product.
- filoleg 5y ago
  It is downloadable as a VST at the moment, correct. But are you certain that they aren't planning to release the hardware for it? I could be totally wrong, but some wording on that page makes me believe they are planning to release a hardware component to it. This one quote specifically: "The Kia instrument features a touchpad keyboard [emphasis mine] so you can play as you go. You can create endless patterns, save your loops, play them back immediately and modulate the sounds with the dials. The key buttons light up when played, which offers a quick visual orientation."
  - dvsfish 5y ago
    I think the point might be that you load it into something that is touch screen. This is quite weird of an announcement in general though, so I won't totally rule out that they're gonna make something real in this realm.
    - filoleg 5y ago
      I thought so too, but the wording of "touchpad" instead of "touchscreen" was a bit too weird. I agree though, you are most likely right. Wouldn't be the first time a promo website decided to put a bunch of weird phrasing for whatever reason. Even on that same kia page, they talk about 4 "neuroscientific" parameters for the synth. I was expecting some randomized (ala arturia microfreak) or neural-net related things. Turns out, they were referring to things like BPM.
reggieband 5y ago
I've been thinking about how asmr relates to music quite a lot lately. Some people think it is just a weird thing, but asmr videos of people brushing onto mics are getting millions of views. I think it should rightly challenge our assumptions about what music is. I won't be surprised to hear these sounds filtering into popular music. In some ways it is similar to how harsh clipped digital distortion is fairly popular all over TikTok. Also, I just found Olafur Arnalds from his music cribs tour on Spitfire Audio [1]. It seems he has collaborated with them on some virtual instruments. There are several videos of him on their channel including breakdowns of some of his music. The last couple of weeks I've been down a YouTube rabbit hole on these modern composers (mostly for film and television). 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnKTwPDsDiU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnKTwPDsDiU
NoahRoseWood 5y ago
It’s not a physical product they’re selling from what I can see. It’s a downloadable application
- lisper 5y ago
  Correct. Scroll down the page for download links.
threads2 5y ago
Thanks for linking research- relatively small n's though. I think the highest in the review is n=36. The one on sleep is n=15.

emptysongglass 5y ago

> The old musique concrete concept was full of pretentious silliness This is really cruel to the very smart, creative people and quite a lot of spirited women who led that movement. Éliane Radigue's works alone are a monumental achievement in music. The entire power electronics and noise genres owe a huge debt to the pioneers of musique concrete. They were playing with new media and giving voice to the industry of cities. I don't see anything pretentious or silly there.

motohagiography 5y ago
J'accuse aside, and while (later) minimalism and experimental stuff are favourite genres of mine (incl. Derbyshire, Carlos, Velvet Underground, and TG), and I do like some artists who happen to be women, I thought musique concrète was more an artifact of criticism and not the expression of musical competence and technique. Cruelty to me is the cynicism of having open minded and generous audiences sit through self indulgent performance art and then telling them it's redemption for their anxiety about being provincial and unsophisticated. Always struck me as a mean trick. However, maybe it's my bias, as if modern power electornics and noise musicians owed me a debt, I would probably write it off.

whycombinetor 5y ago

I think you're missing the point, it's freely downloadable as a standalone windows/mac executable and that's the entire product. There's no physical product.

filoleg 5y ago
It is downloadable as a VST at the moment, correct. But are you certain that they aren't planning to release the hardware for it? I could be totally wrong, but some wording on that page makes me believe they are planning to release a hardware component to it. This one quote specifically: "The Kia instrument features a touchpad keyboard [emphasis mine] so you can play as you go. You can create endless patterns, save your loops, play them back immediately and modulate the sounds with the dials. The key buttons light up when played, which offers a quick visual orientation."
- dvsfish 5y ago
  I think the point might be that you load it into something that is touch screen. This is quite weird of an announcement in general though, so I won't totally rule out that they're gonna make something real in this realm.
  - filoleg 5y ago
    I thought so too, but the wording of "touchpad" instead of "touchscreen" was a bit too weird. I agree though, you are most likely right. Wouldn't be the first time a promo website decided to put a bunch of weird phrasing for whatever reason. Even on that same kia page, they talk about 4 "neuroscientific" parameters for the synth. I was expecting some randomized (ala arturia microfreak) or neural-net related things. Turns out, they were referring to things like BPM.

reggieband 5y ago

I've been thinking about how asmr relates to music quite a lot lately. Some people think it is just a weird thing, but asmr videos of people brushing onto mics are getting millions of views. I think it should rightly challenge our assumptions about what music is. I won't be surprised to hear these sounds filtering into popular music. In some ways it is similar to how harsh clipped digital distortion is fairly popular all over TikTok. Also, I just found Olafur Arnalds from his music cribs tour on Spitfire Audio [1]. It seems he has collaborated with them on some virtual instruments. There are several videos of him on their channel including breakdowns of some of his music. The last couple of weeks I've been down a YouTube rabbit hole on these modern composers (mostly for film and television). 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnKTwPDsDiU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnKTwPDsDiU

NoahRoseWood 5y ago

It’s not a physical product they’re selling from what I can see. It’s a downloadable application

lisper 5y ago
Correct. Scroll down the page for download links.

threads2 5y ago

Thanks for linking research- relatively small n's though. I think the highest in the review is n=36. The one on sleep is n=15.