Star Spangled Banner was incredible. The way you can hear the machine guns, choppers, sirens, screaming in agony… that was a masterpiece.

The reverse example of this is musicians who play techno with analog instruments, like Pipe Guy, Basstong, and Meute[0][1][2].

There are always some people who get extremely defensive whenever I say that techno didn't click for me until I heard this kind of "techlow" music. Specifically about the part where I think that the reason is also a human expression problem, because of limitations imposed by the electronic media used.

EDIT: having said that, I don't think I would agree with your premise, because it is colored by a subtle form of survivor bias. None of us remember what it's like to not know electronic guitars or what they sound like, so claiming "the audience intuitively understands what Jimmy Hendrix is doing" is like saying everyone "intuitively understands" their native language. On top of that there's nothing about the workings of an electronic guitar that wouldn't in principle work for something like an electronic violin or whatever.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0gED3rn2Tc

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn52b-bWfFM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYtjttnp1Rs

> There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience

Is that really true though? If I watch a cellist play I can pretty clearly see all the things they are doing and it will correlate neatly to the timbre of the sound.

Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects. My inputs will have different harmonic characteristics of course, and the tube amp's effects are mostly transformations of harmonics; you'll still get some cool tones and they will be subject to a lot of the same rules as if a guitar was being played.

I feel like the synthesizer--CMI Fairlight, Moog anything, Synclavier, PPG Wave, and just the general concept of modular synthesis--are pretty staunch competitors. Yours is certainly a fun and fair take, and arguably the electric guitar+tube amps birthed so many genres (blues, soul, funk, rock, punk, metal, etc) where as synthesizers remained pretty niche with their contribution to experimental music and pop music, mixing in with rock funk and disco, and the titan of EDM that grew out of that.

Great argument -- but I'd also counter that "the turntable" (i.e. in the hands of experts like Q-Bert, Craze, Rob Swift, Jazzy Jeff and others) fits this quite well -- especially re your "have the audience understand what he is doing argument"

You could argue that it's one of the most versatile instruments, sure. "Greatest" is completely subjective.

But is it one of the most versatile instruments? You can do signal transforms with any kind of audio input, although it's done more with the electric guitar than any other instruments.

I would say it in practice, it has the most versatile sonic profile.

There have been some interesting keyboard input devices coming out which allow for more expression than normal piano keys, using a sort of hack to the MIDI system called MPE - MIDI Polyphonic Expression. For example the Seaboard Rise or the Osmose. Depending on the instrument it's possible to do per-note pitch bends, change pressure while holding notes, perform vibrato etc. Visually the physical movement is not as interesting as electric guitar though, so yours probably still wins.

I watched Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips do something similar with some kind of "I don't know what" controller, it was some kind of input in his microphone stand. As he moved it around, the sound and projection changed.

I remembered learning about similar MIDI controllers when I was in school.

I generally reserve the word electronic to mean something with a microcontroller or discreet logic components. Electronic guitars exist, but they're basically differently shaped keyboards.

I often lament the lack of other electric instruments.

Ahem, just two words. Yamaha DX-7.

Synth music elevated electric bound tones to anything ever heard.

I remidn you that most of the rock and roll and rock music was about speed and mimicking the sound of a rumbling car engine, as it was a symbol of the freedom in America, being able to run away from your toxic communities to find yourself better anywhere else.

That was the message for the young with rock and roll: a speedy engine for your ears.

Electronic music was like replacing a car with UFO evoking you a space travel.

With the progressive subgenre of techno music you got the same feeling, but with no subtle hints. Heck, one of the most known songs in Spain ever, "Flying Free", literally remixes the sounds of drifting cars between the melodies, making the listener really happy in a very direct way as tons of youngs in the 90's got into the outskirt night clubs... by car. So they felt as driving an infinite highway rave with no end for days.

I suppose you haven’t heard some really talented sitar players out there. For a traditionally non-electronic instrument, it’s got some crazy sounds.

Hi! I work at IEEE Spectrum and there's no way an LLM wrote this. We have a pretty strict Generative AI use policy (bottom of this page https://spectrum.ieee.org/about). I'm guessing this is from writers using actual writing techniques that Gen AI stole from...

It's because there's clearly a near-1:1 ratio of input to output. I also noticed some LLMisms, and I suspect the author may have ran the text (perhaps in the form of a large number of bullet points) through an LLM. But because he's using the LLM to clean instead of multiply, it's still worth reading.

LLM-isms are tolerably bad. LLM's narrative ability is intolerably terrible. As others said, because a human actually wrote the overall narration for this, it was still compelling to read. The mistake would be skipping a well-narrated and thoughtful article just because of a few bad LLMisms.

I think LLM's lack of "theory of mind" leads to them severely underperforming on narration and humor.

It doesn't read like an LLM to me. What are you seeing?

I didn't see any LLM-isms. Emdashes I guess, but I expect those in actual articles, they're only fishy in social media comments.

I bailed, it just really kills my desire to keep reading.

Brian May stands out even among that group (well maybe not w/ Les Paul there)

The guy built his own guitar as a teenager and has played it for the rest of his career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Special

"Muddy Waters invented electricity!" -- Willie Brown, Crossroads (movie), 1986

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHMv0ORn0hg

The podcast "History of Rock in 500 Songs" (full disclosure: I am a devout, slavering fan) provides these on the regular. I was actually smiling when I heard a fairly new song that attempts a really flat, fuzzed out sound because it made me think, "Buddy Holly invented that by accident with a broken speaker". One of the episodes on The Who goes into the Marshall behind Marshall amps in similar detail.

I suppose if I were going to recommend a single episode to Hacker News though, it would be https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-146-good-vibrations-by-... which begins with at least a half hour on the amazing (if not happy) life of the guy who invented the Theremin, Lev Sergeyevich Termen.

Eddie Kramer?

I came into a CS and math background without CE or EE, and took two dedicated optimization courses (one happened to be in a EE department, but had no EE prereqs), as well as the optimization introduced in machine learning classes. To be honest a lot of the older school optimization is barely even useful, second-order methods are a bit passe for large scale ML, largely because they don't work, not because people aren't aware (Adam and Muon can be seen as approximations to second-order methods, though, so it is useful to be aware of that structure).

Isn't Nagle usually introduced in a networking class typically taken by CS (non-CE/EE) undergrads?

Just because EEs are exposed to some mathematical concepts during their training doesn't mean that non-EEs are not exposed through a different path.

Art and engineering are both constrained optimization problems - at their core, both involve transforming a loosely defined aesthetic desire into a repeatable methodology!

And if we can call ourselves software engineers, where our day-to-day (mostly) involves less calculus and more creative interpretation of loose ideas, in the context of a corpus of historical texts that we literally call "libraries" - are we not artists and art historians?

We're far closer to Jimi than Roger, in many ways. Pots and kettles :)

It's also a standard right handed strat, which seems like an oversight for a guy famous for playing with a right handed strat flipped upside down.

Interesting economic indicator. But isn't Jimi playing on the radio all the time somewhere?

I prefer the Circle Jerks:

  In a sluggish economy
  Inflation, recession
  Hits the land of the free
  Standing in unemployment lines
  Blame the government for hard time
  
  We just get by
  However we can
  We all gotta duck
  When the shit hits the fan

This is my church.