Speculative Sound Synthesis: Why the Future of Music Might Not Sound Like Music at All

What if sound synthesis isn’t just a technical craft, but a way of thinking - a method for imagining futures that don’t yet exist? That’s the provocation at the heart of Speculative Sound Synthesis, a research project and ECHO journal issue exploring how we create, perceive, and conceptualize sound.

This isn’t another piece about plugins, waveforms, or DSP tricks. It’s a challenge to the very assumptions that shape electronic music.

The Collapse of an Old Divide

For decades, electronic music has been split into two camps:

• Composers - the thinkers, the architects of form.
• Synthesists / technologists - the engineers, the tool‑builders.

The article argues that this division is artificial. In reality, synthesis is composition, and composition is a form of material experimentation. Every patch, every algorithm, every modulation choice is already a structural decision.

This idea alone destabilizes a lot of traditional music‑making hierarchies.

Art Wants Openness. Technology Wants Closure.

One of the most compelling tensions the article highlights is this:

• Artistic practice thrives on openness - ambiguity, exploration, the unknown.
• Technological systems thrive on closure - precision, repeatability, control.

Speculative sound synthesis lives in the oscillation between these forces. It asks: What happens when we stop treating technology as a constraint and start treating it as a co-conspirator?

Speculation as a Method, Not a Guess

Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead, the authors describe speculation as a three-part cycle:

• Experience - listening, observing, touching the material.
• Imaginative leap - breaking away from what the material “should” do.
• Return - grounding the new idea back in practice.

This isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about creating conditions where the future can surprise us.

The Most Radical Idea: Music That Doesn’t Fit Our Ears Yet

The article invokes Herbert Brün’s notion of “the unheard-of” - music that doesn’t confirm our expectations, doesn’t flatter our habits, and doesn’t try to communicate a message we already understand.

In this view, the goal of new music isn’t expression. It’s expansion - stretching the present so that new forms of listening become possible.

This is perhaps the most provocative idea in the piece:

• The most important music of tomorrow might be the music we cannot recognize today.

Why This Matters

Speculative sound synthesis reframes electronic music as:

• a philosophical practice
• a technological critique
• a creative methodology
• a way of imagining alternative sonic worlds

It invites musicians, researchers, and listeners to rethink what sound can be - and what it can do.

If you’re curious about the future of electronic music, or simply want to challenge your assumptions about how sound is made, this article is a fascinating entry point.

>> ECHO: Speculative Sound Synthesis

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If ideas like these make you want to step beyond familiar tools and listen to what sound could become, you might enjoy exploring some of my own experimental audio apps. They’re small portals into alternative sonic worlds - places where synthesis behaves a little less predictably, and imagination does most of the heavy lifting.

ExoSphere - Endless Ambient Drift >> ExoSphere (iOS/Mac/AUv3) is an experimental sound generator based on simplex noise, which is then used in a granular synthesis algorithm. >> More about this app

NoiseSpace - Noise textures and backgrounds >> NoiseSpace (iOS/Mac/AUv3) is a creative tool for shaping continuous ambient and meditative compositions, based on five independent sound layers that merge into a seamless atmosphere. >> More about this app

NoInputMixer - Feedback-based instrument >> NoInputMixer (iOS/Mac/AUv3) is an experimental feedback-based musical instrument that models an analog mixing console, designed to create a wide range of amazing, otherworldly electronic sounds by feeding the mixer's output back to its input. >> More about this app

BeatCutter - Rhythm slicing & recombining >> BeatCutter (iOS/Mac/AUv3) is an experimental multi-channel app for slicing and recombining sound based on rhythm. >> More about this app

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