#7 About technology...

For a long time now I have had a personal and professional interest in music of all kinds. Having had the opportunity to perform in many different genres - from very early music to very modern, from the highly commercial to the highly individual - I find the use of technology in general (and web based technology in particular) in this field fascinating.

The thing is that for most musicians for most of human history, music has been a physical, hands on thing. You make music by holding an instrument and blowing, hitting or plucking it to make the (hopefully) appropriate sounds. Two primary technologies have changed that millenia old understanding, apart from changes to the methods of instrument construction and performance. The first was the development of recording, from the second half of the nineteenth century, so that music was no longer a creation of sound lasting as long as the human ear could detect it. The second was the development of the web in conjunction with the digitisation of music recording.

In 'the old days', if I wanted to hear a recording of something that I had played on, I would have to get hold of the hard copy - whether vinyl, reel-to-reel, cassette or more recently compact or mini disc. This process would also involve leg work, the Post Office, or a vehicle of some description. But with the advent of mp3 file applications and the internet, that has changed forever.

Earlier this year I was in email contact with a mate, with whom I had worked on an album for a couple of guys in Melbourne. He had made me a rough demo of one of the tracks on a CD and sent it to me in the post. I emailed some comments to him about the drum sounds. A couple of weeks later, he emailed me the same song track, now with changes, as an mp3 file. Within twenty minutes, I had listened to the song through the computers speakers, saved it to my hard drive, burnt it onto a CD and listened to it again on my stereo system and emailed my response back to him (the track itself is over five minutes long). Very different to the process used when I was starting out...