From electric guitars to samplers to drum machines and beyond, the music we love is only possible thanks to the technology used to create it. In many ways, the history of popular music is really a history of technological innovation. In this episode, we partnered with BandLab to unpack four inventions that changed music forever. Featuring author and journalist Greg Milner. Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn. Watch our video shorts on YouTube, and join the discussion on Reddit and Facebook. Sign up for Twenty Thousand Hertz+ to get our entire catalog ad-free. If you know what this week's mystery sound is, tell us at mystery.20k.org Visit bandlab.com/download to start creating and sharing music anytime, anywhere. Buy Greg’s book Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music. Episode transcript, music, and credits can be found here: https://www.20k.org/episodes/tunetech Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Youre listening to 20,000 hz.
What makes a song great?
Of course, the writing, the performance, and the arrangement are all important, but theres another huge factor thats really easy to the technology behind the music.
In some ways, technology is like an.
Invisible instrument thats 20,000 hz.
Producer Andrew Anderson we dont always notice.
The role it plays, but without it, songs just dont sound the same.
There are so many examples of new inventions that transform formed the sound of music, from magnetic tape to electric guitars to drum machines and beyond.
Developments like these can change the course of music history, and sometimes they can even change the world.
Let's get into it.
Music recording began back in the late 18 hundreds, and due to the limits of technology, these recordings sounded pretty rough.
As an example, here's a track from 1888 called the Lost Chord.
But over the next hundred years, recorded music became a closer and closer replication of live sound, thanks to inventions like reel to reel tape, multi track recorders, and high fidelity microphones like this one.
As time went on, musicians expected their instruments to sound as pristine as possible when captured on record.
Here's a tune by the Benny Goodman Sextet from the early forties.
By modern standards, it sounds pretty vintage, but you can hear that recording quality had already come a long way since the 1880s.
But then in the 1950s, something strange started to happen.
All of a sudden, you had these sounds that were just dirty, messed up.
That's journalist and author Greg Milner.
Greg literally wrote on the history of music technology, and he says that the 1950s were a turning point.