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What Sassoon heard were the first results of an interesting project at Edinburgh University in Scotland, where Ducceschi was a researcher at the time. NS Next Generation Voice Synthesisor the NESS team had brought together mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists to produce the most realistic digital music ever created by running hyper-realistic simulations of trumpets, guitars, violins and more on a supercomputer.

Working with both orchestral and digital music, Sassoon is “trying to bring the two together”. He became an established composer at NESS for the next few years, moving back and forth between Milan and Edinburgh.

It was a steep learning curve. “I can say that the first year is just about learning. They were very patient with me,” says Sassoon. But it paid off. At the end of 2020, Sassoon released multiverse, An album he created using sounds he found during the long nights he spent in the university laboratory.

One downside is that fewer people will learn to play physical instruments. Computers, on the other hand, can start to sound more like real musicians or a completely different one.

Computers have been making music since computers existed. “It comes before graphics,” says Stefan Bilbao, principal investigator of the NESS project. “So it was the first type of artistic activity to happen with a computer.”

But for well-tuned ears like Sassoon’s, there has always been a gap between sounds produced by a computer and those made in the physical realm by acoustic instruments. One way to bridge this gap is to recreate physics by simulating vibrations produced by real materials.

The NESS team did not sample any real instruments. Instead, they developed software that simulated the precise physical properties of virtual instruments, tracking things like the changing air pressure in a trumpet, the precise movement of broken guitar strings, or the friction of a bow as air passed through pipes of different diameters and lengths. on a violin. They even simulated down to square centimeters the air pressure inside the virtual room where the virtual instruments were played.