Synthesized music is much farther down the road towards replacing “real musicians” than animation is towards replacing “live actors”. What that experience has revealed is that there are very many “humanizing” elements in real humans with instruments in their hands that synthesists simply cannot recreate, not for lack of technology but for lack of imagination and the experience of BEING the kind of musician they’re trying to synthesize.
I doubt that writers, producers and animators will, anytime soon (read, the next hundred years or so), be able to produce pure CGI performances with the depth, nuance and general sophistication that the best acting provides. But that doesn’t mean that a great deal of throwaway story telling won’t be possible with CGI “actors”, just as the basic quality of an orchestral composition can be heard by a good synth mock-up.
We still need real guitarists, and real trumpet players, with all the power of modern synthesizers and software plug-ins. Some of them continue to be in high demand, and command considerable celebrity power in certain quarters. The same will be true of good actors for quite some time, I hope.
