The role of virtual musical instruments in our music

Everyone of us has surely encountered computer music. Whether are we singers, composers, instrumental players or theoreticians, we listen to artificially-created sounds every day. We only need switch on the TV to hear the stream of signature tunes and music from advertisements. But the question is: what role do these sounds play in our life?

I’m a composer; computer technology is very important for me. Everyday I work with software to notate my music and I listen the notes played by virtual instruments–but just for a reference. I really think it is important to be aware of the influence of virtual instruments and to keep hearing your own natural sound ideas.

Even thought most people would expect that every live performance will sound better than a virtual one, it isn’t always true.

Once I composed a work for woodwinds. The virtual flute sounded perfect with perfect technique and I got used to this. How I was later surprised! I got used to perfect technique and I expected that my musician would not only technically play as well as the computer but also have a better sound, of course. I found out that the technical aspects I had written were too difficult for the musician and therefore the piece didn’t work as well as the computer rendition had.

Nevertheless virtual musical instruments can be very helpful. Especially if we use professional high–quality musical instruments which work in software like Cubase, Nuendo or Logic. I know composers who write music for advertisements and documentary films by using only computer samples. It works quite well, and if you are not a professional musician you won’t recognize it. Composers can also afford to use special musical instruments (temple block, wind chimes, celesta, cymbalom etc.) without any problems–no calling to orchestral players, no matters about money.

Even thought I belong to the group of composers who compose music at a table or with piano and holding a pen in the hand, I sometimes use virtual musical instruments. For me it’s very helpful to send a MIDI recording to my musicians. It’s so easy to extract a .mid file from notation software and replace the sounds with high-quality virtual instruments. But sometimes, I just use my dictaphone and record a live piano version to send to the musicians.

So I’d just like to say at the end: virtual musical instruments can be very helpful for us but they will never be as rich and nuanced as music played by live musicians.

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Eliška Cílková recently moved to Bratislava, Slovakia where she is in her first year studying composition at Academy of Music.

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