Musical/Musicological Implication of My Research

Nonlinear distortion effects are used by many guitar players to modify electric guitar sounds to produce more powerful and temporally sustaining tones that enable the musicians to explore broader range of musical expression. However, many of current technologies in the music industry are made engineer-centered. Those systems may be natural for electrical engineers who understand Ohm's Law and Nyquist Theory, but for non-engineers it is not intuitive at all and indeed difficult to use. The human-centered and perceptually intuitive explanation of such engineer-centered systems are necessary for improvement of modern musical instruments.

Although most of the modern musical pieces are recorded using less or more non-linear distortion effect processors, little attention was paid from academia to improve their sound quality and usability.

One reason for this is that distortion processors became popular in music industory only from 1960s, and because music genres that employ distortion effect processors are sometimes controversial to be considered as the "real" music, academia never had a chance to consider non-linear distortion effect processing for musical use as a serious research interest. In addition, most of the devices used are proprietary products and the manufactures do not publicize their internal structures and algorithms.

That uncooperative development stance may have lead non-linear distortion effect processors to stop evolving for nearly two decades since early 1980s.

・・・と、以前書いた論文の草稿から引用してみます。