Orchestras: No Future?
People often wonder if all this sampling activity will replace the orchestra and live music. It is true that in the past 10 years, film recording work has decreased tremendously.
Cameron Mackintosh has even sought to replace half of the live musicians in his show, Les Miserables with digitally sampled, computer manipulated substitutes and church organs the world over are being replaced by karaoke type organs with thousands of hymns in their memory banks, but new markets usually open when others close and the sound sample business may be one example that continues to grow. Certainly mobile phone ringtones have become a huge and most unexpected growth industry.
Another new media area that has experienced massive growth over the past few years has been computer gaming, which has had some unexpected benefits for the Philharmonia Orchestra as we recorded the music for the Harry Potter computer games.
And why would a computer game have a real orchestra for its sound track and not a sampled one? Perhaps because the real orchestra sound is so rich, complex and subtle in its variations that you canīt really replace the real thing. Besides, if you can afford the real thing, why not have it?
