For those that are wondering, this is actually a soft-synth. You can download it and run it on Windows or Mac, and it's actually pretty nice, they included a VST version so you can use it in your DAW of choice. I just loaded it into Live 11 without issue, and it sounds pretty nice.
I'm a sucker for these kinds of self-contained synths (think OP-1, I owned 2 at one point), and it would be neat if Kia actually made this. Doesn't look like the plan(?) but maybe i missed it?
I don't know what there is to make. It's a dirt-simple subtraction synth, any Model D clone and a digital sampler could do the same thing (if not more).
I would be really surprised if something like this took off in the greater synth market.
And recommendations for something that will run on a Debian system? This looks like something that I'd like to try, but it doesn't have to necessarily be the Kia implementation.
This is the kind of thing Nokia used to put out when their main product was stagnant and they were inept at software, but also paying hundreds of millions to ad agencies and design consultancies to come up with brand coolness band-aids.
> Kia and Hyundai are putting out some of the more exciting products right now in the car industry
The most exciting news out of Hyundai is that they are winding down ICE development to maintenance only. There will be no next generation ICE out of that company. I think that they are the first major automobile manufacturer to make such an announcement. Not since WW II have we seen a major automobile manufacturer make such a pivot.
I kind of think them building a deep product design bench to pull off their design revolution would also lead to these kinds of projects because those groups love this kinds of side projects.
You actually don't want many "car guys" in these design groups unless it's for a sports/enthusiast car, so some non-car product design people were likely hired, a good thing.
Their Telluride is one of the hottest selling SUVs, it's pretty difficult to buy. Hyundai/Kia seem to be on a tear right now with their newer vehicles.
I just bought a Telluride on Monday and love it. It is the highest ranked car on Consumer Reports across all vehicle types. I don't think this is an indicator of a company in trouble.
Very smart and admirable for taking a risk. When you look at what Kia has done with their cars in the last decade, they really are an ascendent company.
I go on about Yamaha as a company a bit, but when I saw this, I saw a future Yamaha level of design. Cars are just rolling smartphones now anyway, and even if this instrument becomes a loss leader, it may move Kia from a car company to a lifestyle brand.
The pink noise stuff is more interesting than the woo implied by it, since it's the basis for lofi beats, and ambient/minimalist music in general is arguably hitting a new crest probably not seen since the early 90s. I just paid an unreasonable amount of money for tickets to see Olafur Arnalds, and saw a symphony do a Philip Glass premire just the other week. The old musique concrete concept was full of pretentious silliness, but the core idea of 'music as an experience' seems to be blooming just now. If you listen to electronic music and DJs, a lot of it is ephemeral, and this Kia instrument for personal sound design seems like a tool for that same experiential music.
Their appeal to science on this one is neither here nor there for me, but I've done some reading on the topic to support my own music experients. These were the papers that I used to justify buying more VCOs for my modular rig, and they may be on to something:
Worst case, it's a spectacular flop, a bunch of them end up going for pennies on ebay, and a few years later some poor kids somewhere pick them up and use them the way they did the Roland 303.
I think you're missing the point, it's freely downloadable as a standalone windows/mac executable and that's the entire product. There's no physical product.
It is downloadable as a VST at the moment, correct. But are you certain that they aren't planning to release the hardware for it?
I could be totally wrong, but some wording on that page makes me believe they are planning to release a hardware component to it. This one quote specifically:
"The Kia instrument features a touchpad keyboard [emphasis mine] so you can play as you go. You can create endless patterns, save your loops, play them back immediately and modulate the sounds with the dials. The key buttons light up when played, which offers a quick visual orientation."
> The old musique concrete concept was full of pretentious silliness
This is really cruel to the very smart, creative people and quite a lot of spirited women who led that movement. Éliane Radigue's works alone are a monumental achievement in music. The entire power electronics and noise genres owe a huge debt to the pioneers of musique concrete. They were playing with new media and giving voice to the industry of cities. I don't see anything pretentious or silly there.
J'accuse aside, and while (later) minimalism and experimental stuff are favourite genres of mine (incl. Derbyshire, Carlos, Velvet Underground, and TG), and I do like some artists who happen to be women, I thought musique concrète was more an artifact of criticism and not the expression of musical competence and technique.
Cruelty to me is the cynicism of having open minded and generous audiences sit through self indulgent performance art and then telling them it's redemption for their anxiety about being provincial and unsophisticated. Always struck me as a mean trick. However, maybe it's my bias, as if modern power electornics and noise musicians owed me a debt, I would probably write it off.
I've been thinking about how asmr relates to music quite a lot lately. Some people think it is just a weird thing, but asmr videos of people brushing onto mics are getting millions of views. I think it should rightly challenge our assumptions about what music is. I won't be surprised to hear these sounds filtering into popular music. In some ways it is similar to how harsh clipped digital distortion is fairly popular all over TikTok.
Also, I just found Olafur Arnalds from his music cribs tour on Spitfire Audio [1]. It seems he has collaborated with them on some virtual instruments. There are several videos of him on their channel including breakdowns of some of his music. The last couple of weeks I've been down a YouTube rabbit hole on these modern composers (mostly for film and television).
I downloaded and installed it so you don't have to. Review:
It has 8 built-in samples that play continuously. It also has a knob to add filtered white noise, which also plays continuously. Then there's a monophonic subtractive synthesizer, which I was unable to get to make any particularly nice sound. If I hold down a key for a while and then press a different one the sound unexplicably stops.
This a pretty lame instrument, which is beaten-out in both features and quality by the stock instruments that your DAW came with. Even if that's the 2002 version of Fruity Loops.
My impression (not having read about the history of this thing) is that this was some Kia employee's side project that some genius executive was impressed by, in the same way that my mom is impressed when I put two windows side-by-side on her computer.
This is…a little weird…but car companies have all sorts of goofy branding exercises, like fashion collaborations with Louis Vuitton and…uh…steak knives.
Porsche is a luxury brand like Louis Vuitton, no wonder they collaborated. Porsche even has a subsidiary Porsche Design that designs luxury goods.
Louis Vuitton has made coffee cups, dumbbells, pizza boxes, etc. Fashion houses and luxury brands are notorious for those sort of things more so than any car company.
Disappointing that for all the work they did, they didn't look at an actual piano to get the key geometry right. Specifically, black keys aren't centered between the two adjacent white keys, they are offset to allow all keys (white and black) to be approximately equal width at the back of the keyboard.
I started to point out that that one isn't correct either (notice how the back part of the E key is significantly wider than the back part of the F key, which is wrong), but then I noticed that the article says this (mentioning me):
"Update 13 October 2021: This method is great for getting piano key proportions very near accurate with a few very simple steps. Thanks to Rob Brown who added more details in the comments that will be helpful to anyone looking to make a highly accurate model (e.g. if you’re trying to align a drawing with a photo)"
The actual proportions are described in the link above (I wrote a little algorithm to do it accurately for my music app)
A little off topic, but I have a Kia and I feel like they made all the locking and unlocking behavior as unintuitive as possible. I always find myself pushing more buttons than I think should be necessary. And at the same time, if I walk behind the thing with the keys in my pocket, half the time it opens the trunk completely unbidden.
Also, the infotainment system is constantly yelling at me about contact downloading from my phone and I have no idea how to turn that off.
Weird combination of hard to operate and way too proactive. I wonder what kind of team would produce this Frankenstein behavior.
The stuff that needs to work does work though, and the price worked for me.
I love the car itself; it is cheap to run and reliable, but, oh, boy, does the software ever suck. I have never seen a car with so many software bugs. Two examples (out of many):
The car is set to unlock the doors when I shift to Park, but if a passenger manually unlocks a door while I am still in Drive, it does not unlock the other doors when I do select Park. I need to shift to Park, back to Drive, and then back again to Park to let the rest of the passengers out.
If my phone's Bluetooth is connected to the car stereo, and I forget to turn off the head unit before turning off the ignition, then next time I start the car, the radio starts playing at maximum volume.
> If my phone's Bluetooth is connected to the car stereo, and I forget to turn off the head unit before turning off the ignition, then next time I start the car, the radio starts playing at maximum volume.
I'm renting a Fiat at the moment and it has this same bug. It's so infuriating that I stopped playing music in it entirely.
Can’t speak to the other problems, but the trunk thing is a handsfree feature that opens the liftgate if you’ve been away and then return with the keys. Not sure why they didn’t go with the standard “kick under the trunk” handsfree thing, though.
Readit News
I'm a sucker for these kinds of self-contained synths (think OP-1, I owned 2 at one point), and it would be neat if Kia actually made this. Doesn't look like the plan(?) but maybe i missed it?
I would be really surprised if something like this took off in the greater synth market.
I really doubt it's stagnation.
https://electrek.co/2021/12/28/hyundai-shuts-down-engine-dev...
I kind of think them building a deep product design bench to pull off their design revolution would also lead to these kinds of projects because those groups love this kinds of side projects.
You actually don't want many "car guys" in these design groups unless it's for a sports/enthusiast car, so some non-car product design people were likely hired, a good thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31187712
Still better than stupid commercials for marketing dollars.
My last 3 cars were Teslas.
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I go on about Yamaha as a company a bit, but when I saw this, I saw a future Yamaha level of design. Cars are just rolling smartphones now anyway, and even if this instrument becomes a loss leader, it may move Kia from a car company to a lifestyle brand.
The pink noise stuff is more interesting than the woo implied by it, since it's the basis for lofi beats, and ambient/minimalist music in general is arguably hitting a new crest probably not seen since the early 90s. I just paid an unreasonable amount of money for tickets to see Olafur Arnalds, and saw a symphony do a Philip Glass premire just the other week. The old musique concrete concept was full of pretentious silliness, but the core idea of 'music as an experience' seems to be blooming just now. If you listen to electronic music and DJs, a lot of it is ephemeral, and this Kia instrument for personal sound design seems like a tool for that same experiential music.
Their appeal to science on this one is neither here nor there for me, but I've done some reading on the topic to support my own music experients. These were the papers that I used to justify buying more VCOs for my modular rig, and they may be on to something:
meta analysis of effect of binaural beats on cognition, anxiety: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-018-1066-8
effect of binaural beats for asmr effects on sleep: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6900908/
Worst case, it's a spectacular flop, a bunch of them end up going for pennies on ebay, and a few years later some poor kids somewhere pick them up and use them the way they did the Roland 303.
I could be totally wrong, but some wording on that page makes me believe they are planning to release a hardware component to it. This one quote specifically:
"The Kia instrument features a touchpad keyboard [emphasis mine] so you can play as you go. You can create endless patterns, save your loops, play them back immediately and modulate the sounds with the dials. The key buttons light up when played, which offers a quick visual orientation."
This is really cruel to the very smart, creative people and quite a lot of spirited women who led that movement. Éliane Radigue's works alone are a monumental achievement in music. The entire power electronics and noise genres owe a huge debt to the pioneers of musique concrete. They were playing with new media and giving voice to the industry of cities. I don't see anything pretentious or silly there.
Cruelty to me is the cynicism of having open minded and generous audiences sit through self indulgent performance art and then telling them it's redemption for their anxiety about being provincial and unsophisticated. Always struck me as a mean trick. However, maybe it's my bias, as if modern power electornics and noise musicians owed me a debt, I would probably write it off.
Also, I just found Olafur Arnalds from his music cribs tour on Spitfire Audio [1]. It seems he has collaborated with them on some virtual instruments. There are several videos of him on their channel including breakdowns of some of his music. The last couple of weeks I've been down a YouTube rabbit hole on these modern composers (mostly for film and television).
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnKTwPDsDiU
It has 8 built-in samples that play continuously. It also has a knob to add filtered white noise, which also plays continuously. Then there's a monophonic subtractive synthesizer, which I was unable to get to make any particularly nice sound. If I hold down a key for a while and then press a different one the sound unexplicably stops.
This a pretty lame instrument, which is beaten-out in both features and quality by the stock instruments that your DAW came with. Even if that's the 2002 version of Fruity Loops.
My impression (not having read about the history of this thing) is that this was some Kia employee's side project that some genius executive was impressed by, in the same way that my mom is impressed when I put two windows side-by-side on her computer.
https://shop.porsche.com/us/en/steak-knife-p15-set-4-pieces-...
So, having some music app is odd, but I’m sure you can find 20 stranger ideas car companies have tried at some point to increase brand awareness.
https://shop.porsche.com/us/en/911-soundbar--limited-edition...
Louis Vuitton has made coffee cups, dumbbells, pizza boxes, etc. Fashion houses and luxury brands are notorious for those sort of things more so than any car company.
It looks weird and awkward the way they do it.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29941801#29943285
"Update 13 October 2021: This method is great for getting piano key proportions very near accurate with a few very simple steps. Thanks to Rob Brown who added more details in the comments that will be helpful to anyone looking to make a highly accurate model (e.g. if you’re trying to align a drawing with a photo)"
The actual proportions are described in the link above (I wrote a little algorithm to do it accurately for my music app)
Also, the infotainment system is constantly yelling at me about contact downloading from my phone and I have no idea how to turn that off.
Weird combination of hard to operate and way too proactive. I wonder what kind of team would produce this Frankenstein behavior.
The stuff that needs to work does work though, and the price worked for me.
The car is set to unlock the doors when I shift to Park, but if a passenger manually unlocks a door while I am still in Drive, it does not unlock the other doors when I do select Park. I need to shift to Park, back to Drive, and then back again to Park to let the rest of the passengers out.
If my phone's Bluetooth is connected to the car stereo, and I forget to turn off the head unit before turning off the ignition, then next time I start the car, the radio starts playing at maximum volume.
I'm renting a Fiat at the moment and it has this same bug. It's so infuriating that I stopped playing music in it entirely.
I might use this again just for the background sounds (rain, forest, etc.)