The other night I was browsing through the book "Synthesizer Basics", which is a great collection of articles from Keyboard Magazine, ranging from the late 1970s-mid 80s, including some articles by heavy hitters like Bob Moog. (I have stumbled across several Keyboard Magazine books over the years and they are all very good; a great balance between technical, practical, and accessible). One of the first pieces in the book is a 1979 article called "The First Synthesizer", which opens with a quote from Hermann Helmholtz.
Helmholtz's idea about "absolute freedom" got me thinking about making music purely in the electronic domain, and how that near-infinite flexibility can also present challenges in making music that sounds suitably interesting and organic and "alive". There are a variety of reasons for that. One is that the brain enjoys complexity -- it's part of what makes art interesting and engaging -- and the vastly complex harmonic interaction of wood resonances and string vibrations and air pressure and fluctuating magnetic fields that goes into playing and recording just a single note from an acoustic instrument, well there's a lot of complexity there, and that complexity is a part of why a piano or guitar or other instrument sounds good.

Similarly, an acoustic instrument  in the physical world presents a more complex and nuanced interface for the player to enjoy. If I'm playing a note on a synth keyboard, only a couple of pieces of information are generated: what time did I hit the key, how hard or softly did I hit it, maybe some additional information about how much pressure I used when releasing the key (aftertouch). Sure, I can use my other hand or a foot pedal to add a couple more levels of accent -- a pitch bend or filter sweep or what not -- but it's still a small and easily quantifiable set of variables. Contrast that to playing a note on a guitar, which I can alter by how hard I pick it, whether I am picking closer to the bridge or the neck, how thick a pick I'm holding (and what material it's made of and what angle I'm holding it at), how hard I'm fretting the note with the other hand, whether I'm using any vibrato or palm mutes or pinch harmonics. And so on. Each of these variables alters the sound in really complex ways, and yet it's all so easy and intuitive for the player -- you don't have to remember which knob does what, you just have to think "play more passionately" and those tonal colors follow more or less automatically.

And this is part physics and part psychology -- there's a feedback loop whereby the performer affects the instrument and the instrument affects the performer. And while electronic sound modeling is getting more sophisticated every day, and electronic interfaces are sure to improve, it's this ferociously complex and nuanced relationship between performer and instrument which is the tricky part. Even with a keyboard instrument like an electric piano, there are now software models of Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos which are practically indistinguishable from the real thing; you could play a recorded song and most people (myself included) couldn't reliably pick out whether it was a real Rhodes or a simulation. But yet by all reports I've heard from people who have played a real Rhodes, it's no contest, the difference is night and day. Feeling the vibrations of the hammers and reeds transmitted through the keys and the rest of the piano, there's something there that inspires the player, those resonant frequencies leaking into the player's body forge an intimate connection that makes for a deeper and more expressive performance.

So the "shapeless plastic material" of musical potential has certain automatic advantages when expressed in the physical world, that require much greater effort to approximate in a purely mathematical/electronic domain.

But music exists not just in a physical space, but also in a cultural space. You can hear just the first few notes of "O Fortuna" or "Johnny B. Goode" or Vivaldi's "Spring" and it instantly conjures up a whole complex set of associations for the listener -- a particular flavor of passionate drama, or wild times, or highbrow culture -- all evoked in detail before you even get past the second measure.

The "shapeless plastic material" of sound is absolutely free in potential, but in practice, the canvas and pigment of music are built upon centuries of past musical tradition. Even radically experimental music does not exist in a vacuum. The vast majority of mainstream music is built upon a whole network of allusions and cultural shorthand, audience expectations and assumptions. If you hear this kind of instrument, and the performer is dressed like that, and is playing in this kind of venue, you the audience will have some idea what to expect from the performance. And again, it's this nearly impossible to quantify harmonization between history and culture and fashion and aesthetics that helps make music interesting and engaging.

So much of the challenge, and the potential, of electronic/experimental music is that it must sometimes invent its whole scope and geography practically from whole cloth. And these new cultural associations can take root quickly -- anyone who has listened to much pop music over the past 10 or 15 years knows what an autotune vocal effect or 303 bassline "means" -- but using the tools of synthesis and digital production as merely another level of cultural shorthand is to miss much of their true potential.

This is a demanding task -- to create a new language and teach that language to listeners even as you speak to them with it -- but there are readily available tools to sculpt that shapeless plastic that would have been inconceivable even a couple of decades ago, and for the courageous and ambitious musician there are countless new weird and wonderful places waiting to be created and explored.