Predictions for the Future of Audio

I just watched an excellent movie called Transcendent Man by Ray Kurzweil, and wow.  This man has some incredible insights into the future.  In the movie, which is based off his book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence Ray goes into detail about the rate of exponential change in our near future.  He talks about nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, merging biological systems with technology, and the possibility that we may live forever.

It sounds pretty fantastical, but I encourage you to check out the movie, he goes into a scarily convincing amount of detail.  I’ve actually been in contact with the director of an upcoming movie of the same subject called “The Singularity”, which also features many interviews with Ray (the movie has been delayed quite a bit but the director assures me it will be coming out early next year).  

Anyway, it got me thinking, with all that Ray Kurzweil talked about with the future of our species and technology, how would it affect music and the way we experience it?  I didn’t do anything more but extrapolate from the predictions in Transcendent Man, but here’s what I think:

• Selective hearing will reach a new level.  Just like cats select their auditory focal point by controlling where their ears point, we might have the option of embedding a biomechanical focussed targeting microphone.  You know, the kind of mic that you can aim at a precise point a kilometer away and hear a conversation as if it were happening right in front of you.  It would be cool to mix like this.  Maybe with bio implants we won’t need to take as many breaks from mixing because of ear fatigue.
• On a similar note, the technology for Hyper Sonic Sound was released recently.  This is a new type of speaker that focuses sound to a specific point by using ultrasound to affect the air.  With Hyper Sonic speakers, sound is not created in the speakers themselves, but actually in the air right by your ears.  Applications you ask?  Well, currently they’re being tested in shopping malls for targeted advertising.  A grocery store actually reported a 130% increase in banana sales by beaming an audio stream to customers standing by the banana stand.  The pre-recorded audio pretends to be your conscience and talks about the merits of buying free trade bananas.  I could see some pretty amazing applications for this type of speaker in the recording studio.  Goodbye headphones, goodbye expensive control room sound-proofing, goodbye difficult surround sound setups, etc.  It get’s pretty easy to mix in stereo when you have two speakers beaming the left and right channels directly to your ears.  In other-words, perfect binaural sound.
• Both synthesis and auto-composition software will grow increasingly sophisticated to the point of any human in the recording chain becoming obsolete.  From the engineer, maybe all the way to the performer.  On the plus side, music will no longer be recorded, but will be created interactively with the listener(s) present and participating.
• How about a program that intelligently listens to you play and can jam with you with the same sense and feel as a real player.
• Oh ya, goodbye cables.
• Maybe in the future they’ll figure out a way to get Logic Pro to stop crashing my session when I press the <save> button.