MusicalTechnologicalDeterminism

Quora Answer : Is new technology the main reason for why new types of music and new sounds in music appear, for example, when the electric guitar, synthesizer, or sampler was developed?

Jun 6, 2020

Yes. Absolutely.

All the major new genres of music in the last 1000 years are the result of new technology. (And a few new ideas.)

"Baroque" and "classical" music are the result of the invention of musical notation, and the printing press which let musical scores be shared and studied. So that people could develop a far more elaborate understanding and theory of harmony than had previously been possible.

These musics also rely on the invention / discovery of "well" or "good" temperament so that the various keys all sound good. Which means that it became possible to write music with key changes in the middle.

"Romantic" music is the result of pianos, which allowed 19th century composers to experiment at home with more colourful and daring harmonies and to discover what sounded good in practice (not just in theory). They then brought those harmonies into orchestral works.

"Jazz", the first great 20th century music, is the result of sound recording technology. Which shifted attention away from the written score (and harmonic structure) and focused it on the performer's individual quirks such as microtonal "blue notes", the performer's elaborate improvisations around simpler lines, or even just the performer's personality.

Prior to recording technology, this kind of thing wasn't documented and so was less of an object of study and evaluation. With recordings, people could listen to the same improvisation repeatedly and learn how to improvise like that.

With the age of crooners, it became less important to be a "good singer" than to be an "authentic singer", conveying plausible emotions through the music.

Jazz also benefited from radio. Which allowed people to hear music they wouldn't have otherwise heard. Many middle-class white people in America would never have visited the kinds of clubs where blues and jazz were born. But radio could bring it to the comfort and safety of their own homes. And so an understanding of, and taste for, jazz became more widespread than it would have been without radio.

"Rock", is the result of electrical amplification. Basically electrical amplification allowed an instrument which was versatile, but traditionally rather quiet, the guitar, to suddenly scale up and fill large spaces like dance-halls and stadiums. For years, guitar had been limited to small intimate settings. But now it could compete against a drum-kit. And was comparable to orchestras, and large bands of brass instruments. So we suddenly got an explosion of music that explored what guitars and guitarists could do when they had loudness at their disposal.

Electrical amplification also inevitably brought its own specific tonality. Originally from the pickups and speaker cabinets. And then through more deliberate electrical trickery in effects pedals.

Another important technology contributing to rock music was the transistor and transistor radio. With transistors, radios became small, cheap and portable. And it became possible for a teenager to own their own radio, distinct from the radio belonging to the household. This meant that teenagers could start to have specialist radio stations catering to their taste without having to negotiate with the their parents. More demographically focused radio and music led to the flowering of diversity in rock in the late 60s and early 70s. All thanks to transistors.

From the mid 70s onwards, we got music that increasingly depended on electronic control systems : drum-machines, sequencers, computer based recording etc. This gave rise to various electronic dance musics, from Hi NRG disco to synthpop to house, techno, rave, drum'n'bass, garage, trance, dubstep, EDM etc. etc.

"Hip-hop" is also, now, a product of electronic control systems and computers. But it started with some different technological innovations : in record players. In particular the combination of two record decks with a mixer allowing cross-fading between the records. And "direct drive" turntables, that could be scratched. These were playback technologies that afforded a certain degree of human intervention. And that human intervention was quickly transformed into a vehicle for human performance, as DJs could scratch one record over the top of a "loop" made by scratching a second record.

The avant-garde had been making music out of other recordings for 50 years. John Cage used radios and turntables in some of his compositions from the 30s and 40s. In the 50s and 60s, composers used tape-editing and "concrete" recordings of everyday, "non-musical" sounds to compose. But hip-hop, via the fluidity of turntables, found a way to make a genuinely popular mass music out of this apparently avant-garde technique.

And, in doing so, it transformed the way we thought about music.

Today, new technological inventions are coming thick and fast, largely in the form of software.

Some of the most striking, and controversial, that many people love to hate, are the vocal processors.

These have gone way beyond autotune which has transformed the sonic landscape of pop and rap music. There are plugins combining pitch-shifting, vocoding and "formant processing" which let you change the sound of a singer from male to female to robot to any combination thereof, they let you not just "fix" but totally rewrite the melody that was sung, or to add harmonies etc.

Beyond that people are chopping up samples of sung vocals to make instruments.

And applying formant effects on, say, dubstep bass to make them sounds horrifically "animal".

And making vocaloid singing voice synthesizers which are increasingly human-like.

Many people hate "autotune". But autotune is the 21st century equivalent of distortion and other effects that guitarists explored when inventing rock music. A whole new world of colours and tonalities for musicians to compose with.

Culturally, voice processing explores that disturbing space where humans become more like machines, and machines become more like humans. I suspect that it's that "uncanny valley" which is really freaking people out. And which makes them rant against "autotune". Complaining that "people who can't sing are getting rich and famous" is a proxy for a deeper unease about automation making human skills redundant.

But autotune is undeniably the sound of now. The hallmark of our new music. We don't quite have a genre label for that contemporary sound. "Modern pop" or "trap" don't quite capture it. I like "auto-croon". But that is too specific.

What's important though is that the music of 2010s and into 2020s is the music that could only exist because of plugins that process voices, just as the music of the late 60s and 70s could only exist because of guitar pedals.

Future generations are going to look back and celebrate the wildest vocal processing artists just as we look back and celebrate the most outrageous experimenters in electric guitar and pedals.

The other major technology of today, of course, is the internet. The proliferation of channels for distributing music. Now anyone can put music online. There are "traditional" online record stores selling music downloads. And streamers like Spotify who aren't really so different from radio.

But YouTube is changing music in many ways.

Firstly there are amazing music educators. People who are great musicians, but who are also showing you how the music is made. Whether it's their FL Studio production techniques, the way they play guitar, music theory from common practice to negative harmonics and neo-Riemannian theory, or circuit bending old toys and sampling embarrassing body noises. YouTube is making every idea in music available. Both to new musicians, and to an increasingly well informed listening audience.

Secondly, YouTube has created a strange culture of "reaction videos", where you can watch other people listening to music, typically for the first time. You get to see their expressions, hear their comments etc. Listening to music is now a performance art in its own right.

Thirdly, popular YouTubers encourage participation from their audience. A YouTuber's fans send him their own production for evaluation, or submit remixes, or contribute sample loops that the YouTuber then redistributes. YouTubers collaborate with their peers on YouTube, leading to interesting experiments and cross-fertilization of ideas.

Finally, of course, YouTube has cemented the idea that music is accompanied by "a music video". Or is, itself, a soundtrack for a music video. Ie. a little movie.

And it opens up the possibility of presenting video alongside music for every musician.

If you want to know what our music is, today, YouTube is where that music is evolving. Along with Instagram and Tik-Tok etc.

The "genre" of this music is a genre which has adapted to be a genre which lives on YouTube etc. We don't even have a name for it yet. I favour just calling it "YouTube Music" It's based on all kinds of other music, but it's not quite like any other music. Because it derives its shape from YouTube.

Technology ALWAYS shapes music.

Quora Answer : Why did the disco genre music in the 70s change to become hip-hop dance in the 80s?

Sep 9

Programmable drum-machines and sequencers got cheap.

In the 70s, if you wanted a groove, you needed a band to play it.

The disco genre is tight, dance-focused, DJ-friendly music.

But it was still composed and played by a band. Who had the mentality and outlook of a group of musicians. They made music for dancers. But also to please themselves as musicians. Constrained by what they could actually perform live.

And then it still needed a record label to decide they liked it. And to invest the money in recording it and making it into records.

Meanwhile, in the 70s, drum machines and sequencers did kind of exist. But they were very big, very expensive and very geeky.

Then by the early 80s, thanks to microprocessors, drum machines and synths and sequencers had become cheaper, and were now smaller, more convenient and easier to learn.

This had a dramatic effect. It meant that DJs could start making their own music.

(BTW : That music was not so much "hip-hop dance" - hip-hop has other aspects to it - as it was "house". That's really the essence of "house music". Music made not by musicians but by DJs. For their "house" (ie. the club they worked at) )

The thing is, the DJs knew exactly what worked on their dance-floors, with their crowds. They knew what the crowd liked. What would drive up the energy. What would hold the crowd's attention.

And now they had drum-machines and sequencers, they could make music that was fine-tuned and structured for those requirements.

They didn't need to wait for a group of musicians to think of that idea, and learn to play it. And for a record company to decide that it might make money, and agree to hire a studio, record the band, and manufacture a record. They could come up with an idea of their own in their studio or even spare-bedroom. Program it, tweak it a bit, and record it straight to tape or get a dub-plate pressed, and take it out to play that week.

This revolutionized dance music. This is why we have electronic dance music, and why it's such a big deal. Microprocessors allowed DJs to cut out all the middle-men in bands and record labels. And to make music directly for their public of dancers.