Having recently heard for myself the fruits of Yamaha's many months (possibly years) of research and development into an entirely new method of sound synthesis - the much-vaunted VL1 - I, like many of those invited to the UK launch, found myself marvelling at the accuracy of its recreation of various orchestral instruments. Revealing an expressive control which rivals that of most acoustic instruments, it was an impressive debut; one can only anticipate the heights to which it will be taken... in the right hands. However, if, like many people, you were hoping that this was the long-overdue push that would again move sound synthesis into uncharted territory - once the playground of the hi-tech music companies - you may be in for a disappointment. I'm not suggesting the VL1 is purely an imitative synthesiser; one of its most impressive features is an uncanny ability to produce the sound of entirely new instruments which ought to exist, but in fact don't. Nevertheless, it is the very 'familiarity' of these sounds which ultimately prevented the VL1 from exciting me in the same way that, say, the Moog and Arp machines did in the 70s and the Prophet and CS80 did in the '80s.

Of course, it's all too easy to blame synth manufacturers for no longer designing instruments that capture the imagination when what we may be confronting is the much more fundamental problem of a limit to the range of sounds the human brain is capable of assimilating. This, by implication, puts a theoretical limit on the range and complexity of sound it is possible to generate. As with so many other sciences, after massive leaps in the early years of development, the changes and improvements become increasingly less distinct and more subtle - to the point where we become enmeshed in qualitative judgments on a highly subjective level. Is a sine wave generated by analogue circuitry fundamentally 'warmer' than a digital waveform of the same shape? If this is the sort of question that occupies our thinking, we risk descending into the adjectival quagmire readers of the hi-fi press will be familiar with.

But the reaching of this 'critical mass' extends beyond sound synthesis. Though it gives me no pleasure to say it, development in the entire field of music technology has slowed down alarmingly in recent years. Whether they care to admit it or not, manufacturers have been involved in a massive repackaging exercise which, though not without its advantages in terms of falling prices, has failed to keep pace with people's expectations of what technology should deliver. R&D budgets haven't even been directed at improving the user-interfacing of existing technology; digital synths, samplers and sequencers remain fiendishly difficult to operate and do nothing to entourage newcomers.

Little wonder that so many people have been looking over the fence to the parallel technologies of computing and multimedia and finding themselves increasingly excited by an industry where new developments are a port of everyday life and the future is a constantly-changing horizon.

Needless to say, this is the language of the junkie; the obsession with the next fix, the progression to more and more potent drugs. But what the hell... having embraced music technology to a level which almost certainly leaves the rest of your family baffled, you're uniquely qualified to exploit the new technologies. No one who has mastered the complexities of computer sequencing and synth programming is likely to encounter the slightest difficult pulling together a multimedia production. And few are likely to be as creatively successful doing it.