By Mitch Rice
The history of music is at the same time a history of human innovation – particularly within the last few decades of the music industry, where the way music is made has changed drastically. Technology has shaped how modern albums are recorded, and even how they are produced – it has meant that you don’t need to be a seasoned musician to make an album; you could be working in a London IT support company by day, and producing chart-topping albums by night. The timeline of how technology has influenced music, and how it has provided all kinds of people with a way to explore their creativity through music, in a way that wouldn’t have been possible if we were still limited to making music on classical instruments recorded in professional studios.
Below are some of the different technologies that have shaped the way music is made today.
Synthesizers
One of the most well-known electronic musical instruments, and one of the first styles of them to become widely popular. The synthesizer works by generating audio waveform signals – by passing through filters, circuits, or low-frequency oscillators, the signals can be moulded into an almost infinite number of sounds. The earliest synths consisted of huge towers of hardware, laced with cables and adorned with all manner of switches and dials (and these types of synths are still popular among hobbyists), but nowadays you are more likely to see compact little synths that are played using a sleek keyboard or sequencer.
The competition between companies to release their own synth instruments lead to the cost of these devices getting driven down considerably. At the same time, with the rise in popularity of electronically-produced sounds, which would eventually lead to the foundation of electronic dance music, the synth became a popular instrument for bedroom musicians.
Tape Recorders
The humble tape recorder is all but dead in terms of its relevance to modern-day society – however it has a fantastic history when it comes to its part in the creation of some of the finest albums ever released: Emitt Rhodes’ seminal self-titled album was revealed to have been recorded on a four-track Ampex at his parent’s home (before being transferred to an 8-track to record vocals); Bruce Springsteen recorded what he thought were a collection of demos for the E Street Band on a Tascam Portastudio 144 – those demos would become Nebraska, one of Springsteen’s most popular and highly regarded albums.
Tape Recorders were also instrumental in the development of Musique Concrete, and the use of the recording studio as an instrument in itself – this approach was popularized and used by many seminal artists – from the Beatles to the Beach Boys, to Brian Eno.
Samplers
Sampling is now one of the most prevalent musical techniques used in modern pop music – and it has a rich history of being in implemented in all kinds of musical genres, but none more so than Hip-Hop.
Often used in tandem with synthesizers and sequencers for electronic dance music – but most popularly associated with Hip-Hop and Rap – a Sampler is an instrument that, rather than creating its own unique sound, uses sound recordings of other instruments, excerpts of existing songs, or found sounds that are not necessarily musical in origin. With the advent of the Sampler, people received the power to make music without a lick of experience on any other instrument – and some of the most important albums ever created were done so without the participation of any original instrumentation (namely DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing).
Sampling has given rise to some very recognisable sounds within popular music, such as the Amen break, a sample of the 1969 track “Amen, Brother” (the most sampled track in history). The voice of Loleatta Holloway has been sampled heavily for house and dance tracks, and was cited as ‘the most sampled female voice in pop music’. From Led Zeppelin to Igor Stravinsky, many artists have had excerpts from their work sampled, and those samples have gone on to be so pervasive and recognisable, that their origins are lost on many people who recognise it.
Digital Audio Workstations (DAW)
Here at the end of the timeline we have the pinnacle of electronic musical instrumentation, the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). These devices come in all shapes and sizes, they could be nothing more than a piece of software that you need to install on a laptop, or it could be a standalone device, or it could comprise a whole infrastructure of components controlled by a central device (usually a laptop or desktop computer).
DAWs have been around since the 1970s, although most attempts to create them were marred by limits on storage, processing speeds, and disk speeds at the time – thus the vision of Digital Audio Workstations did not really come to fruition until the 1980s. Integrated DAWs – digital audio workstations that were just that, and could not perform any other function – were popular for a while, until commercial PCs became powerful enough for people to run Software DAWs on them (which are now the most common form).
Data and information are provided for informational purposes only, and are not intended for investment or other purposes.
