MusicalTechnologicalDeterminism

ThoughtStorms Wiki

This page largely superseded by some of the writing on TechnologyAndMusic.

But perhaps that should be moved back here.

This would be the TechnologicalDeterminist theory of pop music, ReadWith Noise,

Late 19th century	PlayerPianos	Ragtime
Early 20th century	MechanicalRecording	Jazz
Mid 20th century	Better quality recording, better microphones	Cool jazz, crooners
Mid 20th century	Electric guitar	Rock'n'roll
Late-mid 20th century (the 60s)	More amplification, 4-track recording, early synthesizers	Rock, psychadelic rock
Early-late 20th century (the 70s)	more synths, cheaper recording studios	Diversifying, experimental rock
Mid-late-20th century (late 70s)	Cheaper recording studios and record manufacture, smaller and more portable amplification	Punk/ New Wave
Mid-late-20th century (late 70s)	Recording studios and technology cheap enough for the post-colonial world	Dub reggae
Mid-late-20th century (late 70s)	Twin-turntable and mixer with cross-fade	Disco
Mid-late-20th century (late 70s, early 80s)	Very cheap synthesizers and (especially) drum-machines	post-punk, new wave, early 80s synth-pop
Mid-late-20th century (late 70s, early 80s)	Direct-drive turntables to allow scratching	Early hip-hop
Late-late-20th century (mid-late 80s)	Sampling, cheaper synths and drum-machines, cheap PCs as sequencers, cheaper turntables and mixers	House, Techno
Late-late-20th century (mid-late 80s)	Early analogue synths (like TB303 bassline) become available on second-hand market	Acid House
Even later 20th century (late-80s, early 90s)	Home-computer sampler / sequencers (Atari and Amiga)	"cut-up" dance made with samples, Rave
Late-late 20th century	pitch-shifting software becomes available on home computers, allowing pitch and duration of music to be varied independently of each other	Jungle, D'n'B
Late-late 20th century	software models of analogues synthesizers and effects become available on home computers	Trance
Early 21st century	autotune, forment filtering, "liquid audio"	various AutoCroon vocal processing styles, glitch

... apparently, by end of the 90s, musical-production technology seems to stop evolving, and so does the sound. Great music is still being produced, but sounds remarkably like genres that existed 10, 20 or 30 years earlier.

But technology is about to start shaking up the distribution and consumption of music dramatically ...

Transcluded from PopularMusicHistory

Quora Answer : What is it that the electrical music from the late 00s and early 2010s make so great?

Jan 21

It's obviously somewhat contentious that it is so great.

Different people have different opinions. Even people, like me, who love electronic music and electronic dance music don't necessarily think that the late 00s and early 2010s were particular standouts in electronic music compared to other periods.

But to the extent that late 00s and early 2010s electronic music sounds newer and more exciting than previous waves, it was largely another technological shift.

Through the 00s we were shifting from electronic musicians making their tracks in the studio, plugging together a limited quantity of hardware devices, to full DAWs in the computer within which you could go from the initial sketch to the final master.

From about 2005 it became plausible to make a whole track in a laptop, with nothing but software. And more or less any degree of sophistication in terms of the number of software instruments and effects. (Really power of computer and access to the software was the only limiting factors.)

VST plugins were getting more and more powerful. Kids with next to no money could still get pirate copies of virtual studio equipment previously only available to professionals. In particular, I think that made them go wild with compression and other effects that an earlier generation of electronic musicians didn't think about much.

When I had my "bedroom studio" in the 90s, I had cheap echo and reverb and phaser effects etc. The "creative" ones to do obvious tricks with sound. It wouldn't have occurred to me that I needed a compressor or a limiter etc. I didn't even know they existed, let alone what they were. Only if I'd been lucky enough to go into a real professional studio with professional mix engineers would I have been exposed to such things.

But by 2010, we all had compressors and limiters etc in our DAWs. And knowledge of how to use them was being disseminated as much as any other technique.

With the rise of EDM etc. and the 2010s wave of dubstep etc, one of the things we were hearing were the kids taking this kind of technology and incorporating it into their compositions to use compression and loudness etc. to add excitement to their sounds.

Take something like side-chain compression. It's an old technique, that was always used subtly. Intended to be "unnoticeable". Something to just eliminate clipping to get a perfect recording.

Then in the 2010s, people started using it very visibly to create an audible "pumping" effect to add more excitement to their EDM tracks. Side-chaining went from subtle studio professionalism to lairy "creative" effect. Why did that happen in the 2010s, and not the 1990s? Because kids in their bedrooms didn't have a tonne of compressors to mess about with in the 90s. But in a DAW in 2010, a compressor was as accessible as an echo unit. So they played with it.

tl;dr : That sound of the late 00s, early 10s is the sound of a new generation of electronic artists getting their hands on a whole lot of professional audio techniques that earlier generations wouldn't have thought about. In particular they used compression to make the sound huge. Maximizing every kind of loudness they could think of.