Prims and electric pianos

Once upon a time, people tried to create an electric piano, an instrument, ideally small and portable, that had the characteristics of a piano: velocity sensitive, polyphonic, with the kind of controls a piano has, most notably a "damper" (sustain) pedal. Various companies tried: Wurlitzer and Rhodes with mechanical methods, Yamaha later with FM synthesis. The resulting instruments didn't sound very much like a piano at all--but now you will find synth patches that do their level best to reproduce those sounds. What you won't, and probably never will, see are patches that do their best to reproduce a sampling instrument. They're not wrong enough to be of musical interest in their own right. It's a musical "uncanny valley," if you will.

(I take that back. The Mellotron was an early sampling instrument that played taped samples of instruments, and Mellotron strings are very tied to the 60s, in things like the songs of the Moody Blues, or Black Sabbath's "Changes". That's the one sampler someone may try to reproduce the sound of.)

I thought of that just now when I looked over the blog and saw the statue of the Buddha. It is very much an artifact of its time and of geometrical prims. Sculpture made from them has a style imposed by the constraints of the tools. (Not a new thing; see Oscar Ogg's book The 26 Letters, an entertaining, insightful, and beautiful work.) It encourages results reminiscent of the 1930s and streamlined objects. A Buddha made of sculpted prims would be very different. Closer to RL statues of the Buddha... but not necessarily more or less beautiful than what is now in Varosha.