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Everyone on this site knows Ray Kurzweil. Unfortunately, I think almost no one on this site knows the thing Kurzweil was responsible for that was most important: The K2000 synthesizer.
It had an incredibly impressive synthesis engine, and an interface so complicated that the "video training manual" was over an hour long!
The sounds that come out of the thing are absolutely transcendent, and if you were into music in the 90s or 2000s that wasn't rock music, you probably have enjoyed it in something or another.
If you work on AI, please consider hurrying to one outcome or another so that Kurzweil can get back to doing what I care about (making beautiful and innovative ROMplers) prior to his eventual appointment with a liquid nitrogen vat. The new models simply are not the same, and the space could use his undivided attention once more.
I was gifted a (broken) K2600 in 2017, and am thrilled to learn of this new source of narrative continuity in my life. I’ve chalked it up to a simple name collision for the past near-decade.
That said: I don’t take the K2000 to be an especially complicated or lovely-sounding instrument among those in its reference class (MS2000, Jupiter, Virus, Yamaha SY/ES). And, indeed, it hasn’t stood the test of time in terms of a proliferation of emulations, etc. Still, definitely a canonical instrument and excellent factoid (for me especially!).
The thing about that comparison is that the K2000 is a ROMpler (and there were releases a few years later that made this workflow much easier), so the sounds you can get out of it depend pretty heavily on what you give to it, and how innovatively you crush those sounds.
Regardless of your views on the (excellent!) K2000, please work on bringing the AI thing to a speedy close in one way or another (convincing Eliezier to become an accelerationist and to write accelerationist blog posts is perhaps the most simple route available to you as someone who works at... (read more)