ABSTRACT
The history of music is, in part, one of a shift from oral performance to notation, then to music being recorded and stored and disseminated utilizing various media of sound (and, later, audiovisual) transmission. These are hardly discrete stages, but they do offer an organizing logic for the overview here. Any new medium of communication or technological form changes the way in which we experience music and this has implications for how we relate to and consume music. It is important to acknowledge that the impact of technology on music is not solely a twentieth-century phenomenon, associated with the advent of recorded sound. Prior to this, print was central to the transmission of music, with the circulation of hand-written songs and scores. The printing press facilitated the circulation of broadside ballads from the early sixteenth century, along with sheet music, which peaked at the end of the nineteenth century. Technological changes in recording equipment pose both constraints and
opportunities in terms of the organization of production, while developments in musical instrumentation allowed the emergence of ‘new’ sounds. New recording formats and modes of transmission and dissemination alter the process of musical production and consumption and raise questions about authorship and the legal status of music as property. It is not possible here to cover all aspects of these topics, which have been the subject of intensive study (see Further reading). Rather, I have attempted to signpost some of their cultural implications, with brief examples to illustrate the interaction of technological, musical and cultural change. As Paul Théberge observes, ‘technology’ is not to be thought of simply in terms of ‘machines’, but rather in terms of practice, the uses to which sound recording and playback devices, recording formats, and radio, computers and the internet are put: ‘in a more general sense, the organization of production and consumption’ (1999: 216-17). My discussion covers sound production, the influence of new instruments on music making, sound recording and sound formats, sound reproduction and sound dissemination.
