I’ll take a shot at this:
This is my area of research, and what you end up finding if you come in with a completely open mind is that digital simulation is one of the most important areas of research for understanding human perception. What is simulation if not an attempt to quantify a means of producing a convincing perception of something? If you simulate an analog synth and you do not produce something bearing a resemblance to an analog synth, it’s not much of simulation is it? The best, most efficient simulation is one that is uniquely attuned to human perceptual limits. If we stop looking at it like a horse race, and more as a way of framing how we, as a society frame our discussions about aesthetics, it becomes much more interesting.
If we don’t take the assumptions of the argument as fact, but use them as guiding questions, I think they become very helpful. For example, why would you want to simulate analog synthesizers in the first place?
Before we ask, that though, we might ask, what was the purpose of analog synthesizers to begin with? You will find a variety of answers to that question that will likely lead to different philosophies of synthesis. If you look at the way they were being used early on, it was often to simulate the sounds of acoustic instruments (very badly I should add). In other cases, it was to find new sounds that were previously unrealizable. Digital simulation of analog synthesizers, in general, serves neither of these purposes, so I would then ask again, why do we do it? Perhaps there was something else about analog synthesizers that was important, and this is why we keep returning to it. In that case, you might ask, what is it about the structure of a particular class of analog subtractive synthesis systems that seems to have importance to a large number of people?
Yes there are also sorts of cultural associations, and you could perhaps explain it that way, but then that leads to complex questions about the role of nostalgia in our society. It also might be worth noting the German roots of both the words Nostalgia and the Uncanny derive from the word for home (heimweh and unheimlich). The idea of the uncanny valley, or the nostalgic look of simulated media (as well as their relationship to one another) seem to have an outsized importance in how we think about aesthetics in popular culture.
I think there’s a lot to unpack here, and how you attempt to answer any of these questions will define how you think about creativity in your music. I am really interested in the differences between analog circuits and digital recreations because I think that you can learn a lot about our current culture through this. Just look at political ads, and how many of them simulate VHS or the look of black and white film; simulated mediation is becoming a symbolic language that’s being used to communicate information that’s not explicitly stated. As an educator in media studies, I find it insane that we do not have a methodology for evaluating these techniques. I think it’s a really important part of basic media literacy. For me, thinking about simulating analog synthesizers (which just happens to be something I know a lot about), is a tool for thinking about larger cultural issues.
Also totally unrelated, people talk about it all sounds the same in a mix, but I have yet to hear someone use a digital synthesizer and have it sound like John Foxx’s Metamatic, Morton Sobotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon, or Pauline Oliveros’ Moon Bog. Most music production today sounds very similar, because particular mixing choices have become a sort of unspoken canon. I think that modern digital simulations of analog gear are reflections of those unspoken assumptions (hell, I would say the same for analog recreations), and this is part of why the distinction between digital and analog is less relevant on modern recordings.
