Amidst the understandable joy, one thing I've seen almost no discussion about: the change in the incentive to research and develop new algorithms.
Most of the new firmwares are re-implementing familiar synth algs into new places. Almost as quickly, aything new that comes out will instantly get cloned to every other device.
Pending strategy, I've frozen release on my newest instrument.
Like open source software, people feel entitled to everything for free. And plenty are feeling vengeful of designers/companies for withholding alg development. This results in rationalization to defend in some cases piracy.
It's nice that "music wants to be free" and that people can dream up new sounds, but this is challenging for new designs. Say Roland comes up with a new technique "WaveZorb." A few audio examples, an afternoon playing it into an LLM and poof, it's like Doom, available on any instrument. Who needs to buy a WaveZorb anymore? Then, Korg invents "FiltFountain," sells three of them, and the alg is on everyone else's device faster than it can physically ship.
It's not worth fighting, but thinking about: The path forward is to gray goo. With little to differentiate any instrument from another. And little support or incentive to make any new synthesis algorithms.
Its going to be very hard to compete, and therefore will be less attractive for innovators
Just like us, but with graphics or landing pages ;)
(On a sidenote: and even Suno can be used in "correct" ways, as long as money and rights flow the right ways, like Arthur Baker said in his interview with ?uestlove, where he was describing how he would hire musicians and tell them what to play and how, and is saying "what's the difference with Suno?"
Creative / intelligent / motivated individuals instead use the instrument creatively (whatever that means in that person's field) because it's so easy to not make slop if you care just a tiny bit about the output the slop machine is producing.
Still, seeing the slop being churned out for fame still hurt me (i'm a software developer, hardware designer, used to be a musician and back then i had a couple of good ideas but i missed the eurorack train), but i am doing my best not to be an hypocrite about it