Newspapers, Record Stores, and The Tonga Room

I. The Death of The Newspaper

No-one could save Woolworths, because the niche it had catered for no longer existed. Similarly, commentators are up in arms about the plight of regional newspapers. But when was the last time you read one? Sometimes, the depressing conclusion is the only accurate one.

There's a simple reason the newspaper business is in trouble: No one is buying newspapers anymore. You aren't. I'm not. As a result, newspapers are in a death spiral of sorts - they start raising their prices, which makes even fewer readers want to buy them.

Offering free Internet versions of newspapers is one competitor. Another is pure Internet news aggregation and free sites. But there's more to this story, and less.

Television and Internet news provide news instantly, on demand, as it happens. Print newspapers have an inherent lag which results in "aged news", as The Daily Show cruelly notes:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
End Times
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Jason Jones in Iran

Cruel, yes. But also true.

The real problem with the newspaper business is that newspapers did not really understand their business. Most newspapers derive a majority of their revenue from advertising - classified (user-generated ads, if you will) and paid advertising. In effect, they are advertising delivery vehicles that happen to have news.

Once Craigslist, Ebay, Freecycle, HotJobs, Monster, and other special-purpose sites ate the newspapers primary classified businesses, the newspapers started dying. Newspapers hadn't realized their "true business" was conveying classified ads. If their business really was news, papers would be competing and succeeding on the quality and quantity of news. Newspapers that delivered true, accurate, and well-written news - or at least popular news - should thrive.

While people can argue about the quality of news reporting over the last few years, it is difficult to argue that a general decline in quality is responsible for people abandoning the newspapers for Internet and TV news, as those providers offer even lower quality, less reliable news. That's not why revenues and readership are declining.

Ultimately, the regional (and some national) newspapers are dying because people just don't care about them. No readers, no purchases, no paper. They're less relevant to readers because there's better ways to get news (TV, Internet) since the key value for news to users is timeliness. They're less relevant to advertisers because their targets are elsewhere now.

II. The Death of Record Stores
The National Association of Record Merchants (NARM) is now sponsoring "National Record Store Day", as sure a sign of the irrelevance and death of the record store as there is. It was April 18, 2009 this year.

They're dying for the same reasons newspapers are dying. You're not going there. I'm not going there. NARM is reduced to creating a "holiday" for it. Their website is a study in looking back to the good old days, with its 90s fontography. (And kids, that funny-looking "o" is supposed to represent a 45-RPM single. They haven't really been sold in most record stores for nearly 20 years. They're kind of like shellac 78s. Oh never mind.)

Why aren't we going there anymore? There are parallels with the newspaper situation. Record stores died because they didn't really understand the value in their business. Record stores assumed there was something "magical" about the record store experience. But really, record stores only existed because people needed a place to go buy music. The only reason we went was to get music. Once we could get it someplace else, we stopped going.

Once Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Target started carrying the Top 100, 40, 20, or 10 (and deeply discounting those records as loss-leaders to generate store traffic), record stores began to lose their walk-in traffic from casual fans who wanted one record and would pick up a few others as impulse buys.

Once Amazon and other web sites were able to offer catalog depth far exceeding even the largest megastore, record stores began to lose their hard-core traffic. I remember trying to buy a Kraftwerk record in the late 90s at the Virgin Megastore on Sunset Boulevard. I was told by one of these employees they could "special order" it for me. It would cost extra and take 2-3 weeks to arrive. I went home, ordered it on Amazon, and it showed up days later, on my doorstep. No extra charge. Unsurprisingly, that Virgin Megastore is now shuttered.

Of course, not all record stores are gone, just like not all newspapers are gone. But the ones that remain are the same kind of small, niche-oriented, small sub-culture shops that exist for just about any hobby, such as comic-book collecting.

And just like some people enjoy the ritual or habit of reading the Sunday paper (partially because it's old fashion, tradition, etc.) there are people who enjoy browsing and wandering through record stores.

But record stores, like newspapers, are irrelevant to the majority. They're no longer a cultural force, and like newspapers, ultimately only have themselves to blame. More forward-thinking stores would have understood they were in the music distribution business. There was no reason for Amazon to be able to destroy Tower et. al. except those stores couldn't see beyond their expensive real estate. They thought their stores, employees, and fancy displays were the "magic" driving their business. All the customers saw that as the packaging around what they really wanted - the music. Once they could get the music in more convenient ways, they didn't need the record store or even the compact disc anymore.

III. The Death of The Tonga Room
In February of 2009, reports began to crop up that The Tonga Room was going to be closed and likely demolished as part of a condominium conversion of the building it inhabits.

Once the word was out, a few people started a belated attempt to save it.

But it's too late. By the time you have to organize an effort to save something - National Record Store Day, for example - it's already too late.

Predictably, the San Francisco whiners come out in droves in comment sections on websites, bemoaning the loss of another San Francisco icon, griping about dot-com carpetbaggers, and saying that San Francisco just isn't what it used to be. They should go look in the mirror.

The Tonga Room is closing, just like newspapers and record stores, because you don't go there. I don't go there. They don't go there. If it had fantastic business, it wouldn't be closing. End of story.

You can get the historical society to label it a landmark. And then just like all the other landmarks, you can museumize it. Charge a fee. Trap it in amber. Restore it to its former glory, just like it was decades ago. Tourists will stop by and check it out on the way to Coit Tower.

But you won't go there. You'll sit at home, reading the news on your iPhone while you listen to the music you downloaded from the Internet. You'll sip your coffee, look out the window, and wish you lived in a simpler, better, time - one filled with newspapers and record stores and charming Tiki bars.

You might even wonder why people don't appreciate what they have until it's gone.

Overcast Books and PDF now available

"Overcast" books are now available from Blurb in both ImageWrap hardcover and softcover. You can see Blurb's preview and order your copy today.

Overcast

RPM 2009 (v1.0)

By Anu

Book Preview

Created to accompany the 2009 album "Overcast", the book features more than two dozen images by noted photographer James Carrière and book design by award-winning designer Iran Narges.

"Overcast" includes the complete lyrics for the songs as well as essays and blog entries by Anu describing the creative process, completed entirely during February 2009.

The "Overcast" book is the ideal companion to the album and a beautiful art piece on its own. It is clearly the best of the books I've done so far.

There is also a free PDF available with the album or by itself.

Remembering Gary Finneran

Gary Louis Finneran took his own life on May 10, 2009. He was 45 years old.

Gary was best-known as the singer for the Ex-Idols, a notorious Los Angeles/Orange County punk band active in the early 1990s.

I knew him as the leader of Tuscaurora, a loud-as-hell rock band in the late 90s. Gary wrote terrific, creative songs, sang with a unique voice, and played left-handed guitar. As musicians go, Gary was the real deal.

Gary was a charismatic, talented, and troubled person. He had an infectious smile and true punk's sense of fun, adventure, and a lust for chaos. Whenever I think of him, I think of him smiling or laughing.

I didn't know him well, but well enough. Well enough to know how much he loved and idolized Kurt Cobain. How passionate he was about music. And drinking.

I spent time with his kids. I saw his bands play. I saw Gary set fire to a stage. My then-girlfriend Anne was the bass player for Tuscaurora and the keyboard player for the M-80s, an 80s cover band who were one of the inspirations for Sid Luscious and The Pants.

I reconnected with Gary briefly a few years ago. At that time, Gary was taking composition classes, "learning to write real music", he said. It sounded like he had moved beyond his self-destructive tendencies and achieved a new kind of happiness and stability in his life.

I am sure Gary's better friends are feeling the same way I am about him these days: Surprised. Not surprised. Disappointed. Angry. Sad. Mystified. Grateful that we had him as long as we did.

In addition to his music and devastated friends, he leaves behind 3 children.

The world is the poorer for his decision to quit its stage.

Tuscaurora - Like We Were Never
Tuscaurora - Beautiful Nothing
Tuscaurora - Get You High
The Ex-Idols - Kind of a Sid and Nancy Song
The Ex-Idols have made their music available for free download.

"He took it all too far, but boy could he play guitar"
- David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust

Dave Allen likes my Faded Flowers Shriekback Cover

Mr. Dave Allen from Gang of Four and Shriekback has taken a liking to a cover I recorded of Shriekback's sublime "Faded Flowers". You can read what he had to say here.

You can get the track from Alonetone.

I am incredibly flattered. Both Gang of Four and Shriekback were big influences on my musical development.

Dave has been a big advocate of the next music business model and is continuing to promote new stuff over at his Pampelmoose site.

This track was one of the last and best things I recorded at The Hive in L.A. before shutting it down and moving to San Francisco. Ace producer Ken Kessie helped with the mix and the always fantastic Anne Kadrovich contributed backing vocals.

The original track has long been a favorite of mine and is a standout on Shriekback's wonderful "Oil and Gold" album.

Duke Nukem, Axl Rose, and the Urgency of Art

Duke Nukem Forever is never coming out. 3D Realms, the studio developing the game, closed their doors last week. Their previous title in the series, Duke Nukem 3D, was extremely popular, sold a ton, and helped build today's game industry. It made 3D Realms a ton of money.

What happened to Duke Nukem Forever? They took too long.

3D Realms announced the game back in April of 1997. 12 years. That is a long time to work on any artistic or commercial endeavor in any industry. It's absolutely ridiculous in the PC game space, given how fast hardware and operating systems evolve. To put it in perspective, the OS people were using at that time was Windows 95!

I do not have the inside scoop on what happened with 3D Realms, but I can speculate. I am sure the company was under tremendous pressure to ship another smash hit, and back in the late 90s choice of game engine was a big deal. id Software's Quake engine was one, the Unreal engine was the other. Duke Nukem started development using the Quake engine and switched in 1998 to the Unreal engine.

This is never a good sign in the game world. Another game which also made a similar engine switch was epic failure Daikatana. Changing engines requires a ton of work with no immediate benefits to the product, only potential benefits. It eats time, money, and team energy. It is also indicative of an error in product planning. Any project considering swapping out such a major component needs to consider whether or not it should simply be canceled.

Axl Rose and the rest of Guns N'Roses were some of the biggest rock stars in the world in the early 1990s. Their popular debut album "Appetite For Destruction" gave them wealth and credibility, so much so that the band couldn't figure out what to do next, releasing a fumbling EP, a sloppy double album of mostly older, pre-Appetite songs, and the inevitable covers album. That covers record, "The Spaghetti Incident", came out in 1993. (Parenthetically, I was working at The Record Plant in 1992 while Guns N'Roses were there recording this album).

The band was, again, likely under pressure to deliver a smash follow-up album of original material. They started writing and recording in 1994, but apparently could not make things work. The band effectively broke up in 1996 and was reconstituted as an Axl Rose solo project while retaining the name. In 1998, the then-current line-up began recording.

"Chinese Democracy" was released 10 years later. The band wasn't recording every day for the entire 10 years - indeed, it's hard to know exactly when the tracks were recorded. It is also doubtful that Mr. Rose and the band were hunched over pianos, quill in hand, writing for that entire time.

Band line-up changes are tough to handle, but in "singer-with-a-band"-type situations, there's usually one principal songwriter (or at least editor) anyhow, and in this case, it was Mr. Rose. From what information is available, it is clear he was the principal songwriter for the album's material.

One could also posit that Mr. Rose was being meticulous in his recording, aiming for some sort of sonic perfection, detailing, or "vibe". But I don't believe that is the case either.

For Duke Nukem, some game footage, animations, and renders have leaked out from the ruins of 3D Realms. While there isn't even a game to evaluate, from what I can observe, it was simply a new Duke Nukem game - same characters and enemies from previous games tarted up in the latest high resolution drag. It's a first-person shooter. Even when these titles really push the boundaries (see Half-Life, Thief, Deus Ex), they're still basically the same game. There is little to suggest that Duke Nukem Forever was going to be a revolutionary title worthy of over a decade of development.

You can go listen to "Chinese Democracy" for yourself. It's a competent hard rock album. People complement it by saying "well, it sounds like a Guns N'Roses album, and certainly sounds like it could have come out after 'Appetite For Destruction.'" Except that the band spent 10 years making it...and that's all they have to show for it? (It is also rumored the album cost $13 million dollars to create, making it the most expensive recording project in history).

I believe both of these projects suffered from similar issues. It wasn't simply the pressure of delivering a bigger follow-up to a commercially successful product. I believe it was a loss of urgency.

There is a belief in the commercial art and entertainment businesses that people can create "hits" reliably and repeatably. And while this may appear to be true for some individuals and companies, I believe that success is out of the control of the creators.

It is possible to execute your ideas well and deliver a financially solid product. But one never knows when a work is going to resonate with the public, catch the Zeitgeist, be in the right place at the right time - whatever - and truly blow up.

As a result, you're better off shipping frequently and as fast as possible.

Creativity is a fire. It cannot be kept up raging for a long period of time on the same project. The longer something stews, the less exciting it becomes. Finish the idea as fast as possible and move on. There is no "perfect". There is only "better".

The more you create, the better you get at all aspects of creating including "finishing" in every sense of the word, and releasing/shipping.

Duke Nukem Forever didn't have to switch engines. They could have released the originally-planned game. If it was "fun", it would have sold. If not, the problem was with the original design, not the engine. Some people still play the (now retro) Duke Nukem 3D. It's "fun", even if the engine is primitive.

Even with the engine switch, presumably the studio had a vision and plan for finishing the game. Somewhere in there they lost it, and started freaking out about what to add, change, drop. One must stay focused.

For Guns N'Roses, the picture is less clear. Mr. Rose is famously volatile and demanding. Still, it is hard to hear the album released in 2008 without thinking this album could have been released in 1999.

If I were Mr. Rose, I would have gone to the public and said "I'm never releasing Chinese Democracy, but I have a new album I recorded last week." Make it fast, ship it fast. Especially for popular music, there's really little benefit in working for years. Many hit songs were written in less than an hour.

Things are a little different for "classical" works - some of that can be due to the sheer number of parts, some of it can be due to compositional rigor - but there are also examples of pet projects composers worked on for many, many years (Bartok's "Bluebeard's Castle", for example) which didn't live up to the hype.

Ultimately one needs to remember that with each passing hour, day, and year expectations rise as well, and probably exponentially rather than linearly.

All of the above is why I do the RPM Challenge every year. Perhaps Mr. Rose should give it a try in 2010. As for 3D Realms, I wish them the best of luck.

10 Questions with Anu

RealNetworks has a "10 Questions" interview with me on their blog.

MP3 Sound Quality Survey

The latest article making the rounds concerns an 8-year study undertaken by Stanford Professor and composer Jonathan Berger.

His study seems to indicate that young people increasingly prefer the sound of music encoded in MP3 format (at 128 kbps) to more accurate reproduction methods, including original CD audio, higher bit rates, and a proprietary wavelet audio compression technology.

There are 2 things to note here:
1. This should not be surprising
2. Who cares?

This should not be surprising. The last 10 years have seen a dramatic rise in the usage of MP3, and I'm sure most of the people in the survey have spent more time listening to MP3s than anything else. The artifacts introduced by the compression are what music sounds like to them.

It's no different from audiophiles who go on and on about how vinyl "sounds better". Vinyl does not sound better. It sounds different. It is a terrible reproduction format, and requires very expensive gear to reproduce at quality (which makes it elitist and bad). Every time you play vinyl records, you degrade them a little, eventually destroying them. Vinyl records warp. They skip and pop. They have lots of surface noise and all kinds of phase problems in the high end. They can't handle much energy in low frequencies, especially when it's not dead center. I could go on.

Tape has problems. Mechanical reproduction (like phonographs) has problems, too. Every generation from the 20th century on has grown up with its own reproduction technology, and they all think their particular technology is the best sounding thing ever, and don't want to give it up for whatever the "crappy" (but actually better) new thing is.

Put another way, old people like black and white movies. Today's digerati fetishize low-resolution 8-bit graphics and the "chiptunes" of early video games. Instruments abandoned for their limitations and quirky sounds are embraced by later generations of musicians for precisely those reasons. People are still going on about how film looks better than video, regardless of resolution.

If most of what you've heard is "sizzly" MP3s, stuff that isn't a sizzly MP3 isn't going to sound right. And it's also worth noting that over the last decade, musicians have started mixing with MP3s in mind.

More importantly...

Who cares? Seriously. For the time being, the record business isn't going to stop releasing music on compact disc. In fact, they'll keep re-mastering the records you already own and selling them to you again (and depending on who you believe and what you listen to, those remasters are way better or way worse). Sales of "audiophile vinyl" are continuing to cook along.

Hell, the music business is still trying to launch higher-definition audio formats. It's too late - new physical formats are never going to go mass-market again. But the golden ears will always be able to spend more money and buy better sounding product (theoretically) to play on their expensive stereos.

So young people like music that literally sounds bad (by objective accuracy standards). I'm not sure how that's any different from young people liking music that sounds bad by subjective artistic or critical standards. Duke Ellington famously said "if it sounds good, it is good". (He didn't actually say that, but that's how it's misquoted). Anyhow, his point was "the only thing that matters is whether you like it". So if people like MP3s, great. They also like light beer, McDonalds, and reality television. I'm not going to hold it against them.

If you want an example of the cynicism and short-sightedness of the music business, look at how they have treated the (allegedly) inferior-sounding digital downloads. They charged the same price. For a low-quality digital file. With no artwork. With DRM.

A few years ago, people were happy to buy 128 kbps Windows Media Audio files for the same price as the full-blown CD. And the industry was happy to take their money. No discount for low sound quality. No free upgrades to higher quality. No premium for higher sound quality.

The industry could have said "yes, sound quality matters, so we're going to sell these low fidelity tracks at a discount, as a teaser or means of price discrimination. You can always buy better quality if you want." That didn't happen.

Instead, the biz sent a message: Sound quality doesn't matter. It's the same message they sent when they sold compact cassettes and 8-tracks. Only recently have they started to also say that it does matter, by offering various more expensive options. Can't have it both ways, guys.

Anyhow, eventually the digital music business will be delivering better-than-CD-quality files - 24-bit 96 kHz WAV files or the equivalent. At that point, we can go back to complaining that no good records have been made since [insert whenever you were a teenager] instead of just saying "kids don't appreciate good sound."

Apple and the New Shuffle: Buttons Cost Extra [Updated]

The new iPod Shuffle is an example of taking ideas too far. Driven by a desire to remove all controls (in particular, buttons) from their products and a business need to churn the product, Apple has produced a bad design that borders on the ridiculous.

There are a number of things wrong with the new Shuffle:

• Proprietary headphones. Apple has done this in the past and nobody likes it. Aside from Apple's headphones being not that good, use of proprietary headphones adds another failure point. Headphones break all the time. So you're stuck paying Apple more money. Or...
• Pay for buttons. It's true. Apple has finally figured out a way to make you pay for a button. Not directly, of course. That would be like admitting they're wrong or greedy. Instead, they expect a bunch of accessories manufacturers to fill the void by offering button adaptors so you can use the new Shuffle with your headphones of choice. For those who don't know, Apple collects a fee (and in some cases, a percentage) from these accessory vendors, so Apple is effectively making money selling button adaptors.
  
• Speech is tech for tech's sake. I haven't heard the speech synthesis feature yet yet. But I find it difficult to believe it's going to accurately pronounce all the names, titles, genres, and so forth. Speech synthesis in an MP3 player is a clever idea. To my knowledge, nobody's done it yet. I'm sure Apple has patented it and is going to continue to talk about how innovative their tech is. But having the machine tell you what it's about to play is not much more helpful than you just listening to what's playing. I can identify 90% of the music in my giant collection within the first second. It's certainly not going to be any faster than just listening. Speech synthesis is nowhere near as efficient as even a 1-line screen for things like browsing, searching through the content on the device, seeking within a track, and other standard MP3 player functions. Mostly, the speech synthesis lets Apple continue to claim their products are different, new, etc.
  

The previous iPod Shuffle (the ones with the clip and the buttons on the face) were as close to a perfect minimalist player as one could get. Nice weight. Integrated clip. Well-placed buttons. Small enough to be unobtrusive but large enough to not have to fumble with any of the switches. Look and feel keep it within the iPod family.

Some may take issue with the lack of a screen. I respond that it isn't necessary for the player's intended use case, price, capacity and overall design.

I'm also of the opinion that the original iPod Shuffle (the "stick of gum") was the best of the lot. Yes, it was larger than either of the tiny shuffles that followed. But it wins because it had the USB plug integrated into the body, so no cable was required. All you needed was the player itself.

The new Shuffles (and, unfortunately, the "clip" design) require not just a cable, but a whole custom dock. I believe this is also a commercial decision rather than a straight design or usability one. The size of both new Shuffles would enable a simple mini-USB jack. Apple would rather lock you into their world and platform and require you to carry more stuff around. More to lose, more to break.

Apple doesn't always get it right - the iPod generation with 4 buttons across the top is one example. They backed off of that pretty quickly. Same with the famous "cube" Mac. I suspect the same thing will happen with the new Shuffle. They'll come back to a design with buttons or at least one button or a touch screen or some new gimmick. Presumably You could shrink it down until it's not much bigger than a headphone jack. I just hope they don't build it right into the headphones.

In the meantime, I'm sticking with my Sansa Clip, which I think is even better than the previous iPod Shuffle. Except the Clip looks and feels like a cheap toy, whereas the Shuffle feels like a quality product. That's OK. I'm not looking at it - I'm listening to it. It works with Rhapsody and it sounds great.

Update (03/16/2009): It turns out that older inline iPod/iPhone headphone controls won't work with the new Shuffle. There may be DRM hardware involved as well.

The Post-RPM blues/New Captain Kirk track

One of the downsides to the RPM Challenge is the post-release letdown. In the days after RPM, I go from elation over completing it to thinking "I should start another album! I'll just keep doing this all year!" to "what am I going to do with myself?" to blackness.

Today I backed up a bunch of projects on my hard drive and went through the sketches and half-finished tracks for my various musical personas. I was surprised to find a few promising ideas and at least one very good track.

I finished up a new Captain Kirk track today - a simple little bass étude. I hope you like it.

I'm hosting it and some of my other pieces at AloneTone, which is an absolutely phenomenal site.

Free MP3 album "Overcast" now available

My new album "Overcast" is finished and available for download. Enjoy.

Liner notes coming soon.

Created for the 2009 RPM Challenge. 8 songs, 35 minutes. Download it (69.1 MB ZIP file).


Video updated with photography credit for James Carrière, who created the amazing images.

RPM Challenge: Done and Awesome

A brief update on my RPM Challenge record: I finished the last song last night. Looks like the album is 8 songs, and just under 36 minutes in length. Despite my initial reservations, I'm very proud of this record. If you've liked any of my past music, I expect you will enjoy it quite a bit.

Master photographer James Carrière shot some incredible imagery which Iran is assembling into a book to accompany the record. These photos are so perfect I am quickly running out of appropriately hyperbolic adjectives and will resort to banging rocks together. I am beside myself with excitement about the project.

I'll post updates when everything is all done. I will finish the mastering and CD assembly tonight and the book should be available by Saturday at the latest.

If you're interested in a copy of the CD, e-mail me. I'll have links up for purchasing the book once it's on Blurb with my other books. This year I should also have a full PDF available as well.

You can read all my RPM Challenge blog entries here (including those for 2007 and 2008).

Everything is Amazing and No One is Happy

Much as I like to avoid the SLYT (single-link YouTube) post, this bit by Louis CK from Conan is worth it. In short, we live in an age of wonder and we are unappreciative:


I have to admit I am probably as guilty of this as anyone. I think as technology advances, our expectations rise as well. At this point, so much is possible that we all start to assume that anything is possible, and damn it, it should be fast and free, too.

I will refrain from old fogeying up the joint with a list of "when I was a kid..." comparisons. I will resolve to marvel at the world I live in at least for today, instead of grinding my teeth because my portable supercomputer takes a few minutes to boot up and load 5 office programs simultaneously.

Sound Synthesis Methods

A few weeks back, Chip Collection wrote a little post asking if all forms of sound synthesis had been invented.

The answer is "of course not" - there will always be more methods of generating sound discovered and implemented, at least by researchers if not musicians.

But the real question to ask is "Does it even matter?"

The art or practice of subtractive synthesis (what a Moog, Prophet-5, Oberheim, and all the other non-DX-7 classic synths use) has been refined and matured to a point where its techniques are robust and powerful. One cannot make "any" sound with it, but the range of sounds a talented programmer using a decently flexibile instrument can create is staggering.

Subtractive synthesis starts with an oscillator generating a simple waveform (triangle, sawtooth, or pulse) with rich harmonics. A filter (usually low pass) is applied to subtract some of the harmonics of the base waveform, thus changing its timbre (and giving the synthesis method its name). Add some envelopes to control volume and the filter over time, and some other modulation and you're done.

When one adds custom waveforms to the usual triangle-sawtooth-pulse combinations, it gets more interesting - other waveforms provide different harmonics to manipulate with the filter and thus produce different timbres. Synthesizers like the Korg Wavestation used this technique. Factor in wavetables (a sequence of waveforms) or samples (very long custom waveforms) combined with subtractive techniques and the possibilities multiply.

Frequency modulation (FM - what DX-7s use) is also extremely powerful, but far more complex to master. Then there's granular synthesis (limited use in instruments today) and additive synthesis.

There are already entire universes of sound that musicians won't explore. Most players use the presets in their synthesizers with little modification. Programming synthesizers becomes more difficult as the instrument gets more powerful. Learning to or wanting to create new sounds is a different thing than learning to or wanting to compose or perform. Many people end up specializing in one or another. After all, how many composers build instruments?

With today's mature synthesis methods, the ability to combine those methods (either in a single instrument or by layering instruments), and the incredible array of effects available, it is easily possible to transform any arbitrary sound into almost any other arbitrary sound using simple tools on a cheap PC. The field is far from played out.

Given that it is usually frustration, dissatisfaction, or boredom with the status quo that drives inventors or artists to look for something new, it's not difficult to see why there's less going on here. When one factors in the business reality that most customers don't want more complex instruments to program and can barely wrap their heads around the existing decades-old technologies, it becomes less likely that we'll see commercial development of new synthesis methods. However, new user interfaces for synthesis that either reduce complexity or try to work in more intuitive or inventive ways are highly likely.

One wonders what Karlheinz Stockhausen could have done had he been interested in using all of today's modern technology and developing new methods of synthesis.