RA: What kind of impact do you think that HD realm of music will have, specifically?

JMJ: People will stop being obsessed by the idea of ultimate quality, and also stop being obsessed, as a paradox, about degrading ultimate quality. There will be a much more intuitive approach to sound, like we have with an electric guitar or with an analogue synthesizer. When you work on a Moog or with an electric guitar, through an amp for instance, you don’t even think about the technical aspect of the sound, it’s more about the musical aspect. I think the whole industry is affected; lots of producers are obsessed with trying to progress in terms of sound quality, and are more likely to be trapped by the gadget of the week, rather than mastering an instrument.

I think the next step is not going back, but to restore the idea of the fact that when you really want to play the piano, violin or guitar properly, it takes a certain amount of time. Technology made a lot of people think that you can make a decent track with instruments you learned the week before, which is obviously not true. For quite a while, then, you had lots of music that was not that bad, but not that great, and not personal or particularly unique. And for every gem, you had a thousand decent tracks that were nothing special. I think that’s going to change: a new generation of musicians will emerge with no technology complex, and they’ll be more in tune with the digital era.