The Present and the Future — Smartphones, AI, and the Return to Hardware

An electronic keyboard in everyone’s hands

By Article 10, the electronic keyboard had left its physical box behind and settled into the PC as software. Today, it has become even more familiar:

• Smartphones and tablets — a single music app puts a synth, a piano, and a DAW all in your pocket
• Free or inexpensive software instruments — the sound of machines that once cost millions of yen is now available to anyone
• The cloud — musicians in different places can co-edit the same project in a browser

Sound design that once required a wall of equipment and enormous funds in the Moog era now fits inside a child’s smartphone. This is where 100 years of democratization stand today.

AI — “generating” music

And the latest shift is AI-generated music. This is qualitatively new even within the history of the electronic keyboard:

• From a text prompt, it generates the composition itself (melody, accompaniment, timbre, and in some cases even vocals)
• Where electronic keyboards had until now been tools for “making sound,” AI steps into the territory of “making songs”
• The relationship between performer, composer, and tool is being fundamentally reconsidered

Just as the synthesizer put “sound synthesis” into human hands, AI now offers “song synthesis.” Whether this is an expansion of expression or something else entirely, no one yet knows. It lies on the same continuum of questions touched on by the sister series [The Lineage of Music Theory] in its final article — “AI that learns theory from data.”

And yet, a return to hardware

Interestingly, even as everything moves toward software and AI, an opposite movement remains persistent — a return to tangible hardware you can touch and operate:

• Reissued analog synthesizers — Moog has reissued the Minimoog, and various makers are newly manufacturing vintage machines
• The revival of the electric piano — the reborn Rhodes company released the Mark 8 (Article 2)
• The rise of Eurorack modular systems (Article 9) — the joy of shaping sound with cables and knobs rather than a screen
• The popularity of hardware groove boxes — self-contained production gear that needs no PC

There is a constant stream of people who choose a finite instrument they can touch over the infinite possibilities inside a screen. This is one contemporary answer to the question that runs through this entire series: “What does it mean to be real?”

Looking back on 100 years through four threads

Let us look back on the 100 years of the electronic keyboard traced in this series through the four threads set out at the start:

1. Sound generation method — mechanical vibration (electric piano) → analog oscillation (Moog) → FM digital (DX7) → sampling (M1) → software (VST) → AI generation. The underlying mechanism was replaced wholesale, generation after generation
2. Iconic machines — the Minimoog, Prophet-5, DX7, TB-303, M1… a single specific model gave birth to an entire genre — rock, new wave, 80s pop, acid, 90s dance
3. Musicians — Isao Tomita, Wendy Carlos, Herbie Hancock, YMO, Kraftwerk… a new instrument always called forth new performers
4. Popularization — laboratory → stage → home → PC → smartphone. Sound design moved from the privilege of the few to belonging to everyone

Contrast with the violin and the piano — three kinds of time

Set alongside the sister series, the three instruments relate to time in entirely different ways:

• The violin — completed and frozen around 1700. People still chase after 300-year-old masterpieces today (its peak lies in the past)
• The piano — its mechanism was continuously improved over 300 years, but the principle of “striking a string” never changed (continuous progress)
• The electronic keyboard — the principle itself is remade wholesale every decade (ceaseless rupture and leaps)

If the violin’s history is one of “chasing a lost golden age,” and the piano’s is one of “continuously polishing a single principle,” then the electronic keyboard’s history is one of discarding a principle and leaping to the next. That is precisely why it produced the greatest number of musical genres in a mere 100 years.

The question of “what is real?”

What ran consistently through this series was the blurred boundary between imitation and creation:

• The DX7’s fake electric piano drove out the real electric piano (Article 6)
• Sampling imitated acoustic instruments while giving birth to something else entirely — cut-and-paste composition (Article 7)
• Software synths created “a Moog more stable than the real hardware” (Article 10)
• And people returned once again to “imperfect hardware” (Articles 9 and 11)

The electronic keyboard has been, all at once, a technology for imitating “the real thing” and a means of continuously creating “a new real thing” through imitation. In the age of AI generation, this question grows only sharper.

Closing the series

Across all 11 articles, we traced 100 years of electronic keyboard instruments — the dawn of the theremin, the electric piano, Moog and analog synthesizers, the popularization of the Minimoog, polyphony and MIDI, the DX7’s FM revolution, samplers and workstations, digital pianos, the analog revival and modular systems, software synths and the DAW, and finally the present and the future.

Read alongside the sister series [The Lineage of the Violin] and [The Lineage of the Piano] (the history of instruments as objects) and [The Lineage of Music Theory] (the history of ideas), it becomes clear that music is an ongoing endeavor, endlessly remade at the intersection of objects, people, technology, and thought. Within that endeavor, the electronic keyboard keeps transforming itself the fastest and the most boldly — an instrument of “continuous revolution in principle.”