Each instrument of the orchestra is a technical marvel, just as the orchestra itself is one. The organ, with the fine control over timbre that its various knobs and stops provide, might be considered the first synthesizer. And concert halls, themselves, are grand displays of an architect’s mastery over acoustics. All these, including the concert hall, are simply tools composers use to create music. And the tools can have as much of an influence on the final product as composers themselves.
Music has always been a forum for exploring and developing new technologies. Ten technologies, in particular, have had an outsized influence on not only the compositional process, but on the relationship we all have with music. From the software used to record and manipulate audio, to how music is stored, to novel ways of generating tones, these ten developments from the last hundred years or so, presented in rough chronological order, fundamentally changed what it means to be both a composer and a listener.
1. The microphone
Nearly every technological innovation related to music presented here depends on one thing: taking vibrating air – sound – transforming it into an electric signal, and then transforming that signal back into sound. The transformations themselves are achieved via vibrating membranes that we encounter as microphones and loudspeakers. It is such a simple concept that it is almost shocking that it actually works. But as remarkable as these processes are, the signal a microphone captures is extremely faint, making it essentially useless unless something is done to it to make it louder...
2. Amplification
Amplification fundamentally changed our relationship with music. Before it, music was experienced as an event. After things like radio and commercial recording became possible because of amplification, music became more common, and it became a thing.
It also meant that more composers could reach more people than ever with relative ease. Guitars went from being barely audible chamber instruments to beasts capable of deafening thousands in an arena. An entirely new world of sound became possible. The Steve Reich Ensemble could pair the softness of early music vocals with a dozen instrumentalists playing full bore, and John Adams could instruct a soloist to lie on her back while singing an aria. In short, everything changed.
3. LPs
Audio recording has been around since the mid 19th century. The first recordings were purely mechanical engravings in soft material that aged poorly and were difficult to reproduce. It took several decades to perfect the technology, but when it finally happened, sound recordings made it possible for anyone to listen to whatever they want in their own home. Today, we associate the recording industry primarily with pop music, but the first recording to sell one million copies was Enrico Caruso singing “Vesti la giubba” from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. The medium of recording itself has also been an inspiration to countless composers. Pierre Schaeffer invented musique concrète, music crafted from found recording, while Phil Kline employs cheap boom-boxes to continuously record and re-record a sound until it becomes unrecognizable.
4. Synthesizers
In the early 1960s, composer Morton Subotnick envisioned a world where anyone could create and perform sophisticated electronic music in their homes. While it took 50 years for that dream to be fully realized, the tool he and engineer Don Buchla forged, the Buchla 100 Series Modular Electronic Music System, was a mighty first step. The “Buchla Box” and all other synthesizers since have liberated the concept of what an instrument is by allowing a user to combine and manipulate electronically generated signals to create sounds that might have never existed before. Suddenly, any sound a composer might imagine became theoretically, if not literally, possible.
A few years after Buchla’s invention, Nonesuch Records released Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon, which was the first work of electronic music to be commissioned by a record label. Its improvisatory feel and energetic rhythms were a departure from the abstract bleeps and bloops that dominated academic electronic music.
5. The portable studio
The Japanese electronics manufacture TEAC released the first Portastudio in 1979. It was a simplified version of a professional recording studio, allowing musicians to record multiple channels of audio directly onto a cassette tape. Although its original $900 price tag didn’t exactly make it available to anyone, by the 90s, these multichannel records were available for just a few hundred dollars. Compare that to the thousands required to record a single song in a professional recording studio and suddenly the Portastudio seems like a revolutionary tool.
Today, virtually every laptop comes with multichannel audio recording software built in, complete with software synthesizers and digital effects. Everyone has the capability for creating professional-sounding music at home with little or no cost.
6. Samplers
Sampling – copying a snippet of audio for future reuse – may not seem particularly revolutionary. At the heart of sampling, though, is the idea of looping sounds, and that idea alone has been enough to spawn multiple genres of music. Without loops and samples, Steve Reich would never have created Come Out, It’s Gonna Rain or Different Trains; hip-hop as we know it would not exist; and without the ability to sample and loop live performance, Maya Beiser might be just another talented cellist.