How Technology Changed Music
Won Ho
AMST 3020-090
Schacht
Final Paper
How Technology Changed Music John Covach, the author of What’s That Sound, distinguishes the cultural elements of pop-culture/music within four distinct categories: social, race, business, and technology. Without a doubt, all four of these traits within pop-culture have been evolving and changing ever since the emergence of any pop-culture. The cultural themes of the always-changing society, business, and technology have indefinitely changed pop-culture and vice-versa. In my essay, I want to discuss how the technology and the evolution of technology affected the growth and modernization of popular music. Undoubtedly, the most important technological achievement for the music industry was the ability to capture sound (on records, tapes, compact-discs, etc.), thus making it possible to mass produce the same record and make it available for millions of music consumers. However, there’s more to the technology in music than just the achievement of recording and distributing songs. Since then, there have been more, numerous groundbreaking technological enhancements within pop-music. Therefore, there should be a stronger emphasis on the power of technology and how it has affected pop-culture. For example, the radio, television, internet, and some hundreds of modern-day instruments, have only been around for less than a century. Because of these technological developments, and because how they’re so fast and recent in changes, it’s critical in understanding how all this technology is affecting music. To put it into basics however, technology has changed music greatly because it has changed how music is distributed, heard, and performed, but most importantly, and as mentioned earlier, technology has changed how music is captured and created. By 1905, Ford had recently created its first mass produced car, the Model T, the first flight took off in America at Kitty Hawk (1903), and the phonograph was still a fairly
AMST 3020-090
Schacht
Final Paper
How Technology Changed Music John Covach, the author of What’s That Sound, distinguishes the cultural elements of pop-culture/music within four distinct categories: social, race, business, and technology. Without a doubt, all four of these traits within pop-culture have been evolving and changing ever since the emergence of any pop-culture. The cultural themes of the always-changing society, business, and technology have indefinitely changed pop-culture and vice-versa. In my essay, I want to discuss how the technology and the evolution of technology affected the growth and modernization of popular music. Undoubtedly, the most important technological achievement for the music industry was the ability to capture sound (on records, tapes, compact-discs, etc.), thus making it possible to mass produce the same record and make it available for millions of music consumers. However, there’s more to the technology in music than just the achievement of recording and distributing songs. Since then, there have been more, numerous groundbreaking technological enhancements within pop-music. Therefore, there should be a stronger emphasis on the power of technology and how it has affected pop-culture. For example, the radio, television, internet, and some hundreds of modern-day instruments, have only been around for less than a century. Because of these technological developments, and because how they’re so fast and recent in changes, it’s critical in understanding how all this technology is affecting music. To put it into basics however, technology has changed music greatly because it has changed how music is distributed, heard, and performed, but most importantly, and as mentioned earlier, technology has changed how music is captured and created. By 1905, Ford had recently created its first mass produced car, the Model T, the first flight took off in America at Kitty Hawk (1903), and the phonograph was still a fairly
Cited: Covach, John. What 's That Sound: An Introduction to Rock and Its History. Norton, 2008. Print. Miller, James. Flowers In The Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Print. Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Changed Music. University of California Press, 2004. Savage, Jon (e-Reserves) “History of Music Players.” < http://amale16.weebly.com/2000---2007.html> 2007. Smith, Peter. “How Technology Changed Music.” Ezinearticles.com <http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Technology-Changed-Music&id=4573381>