The Sound of Music

Don't be fooled by the name of this post. It certainly isn't about the Julie Andrews classic. It's about music and technology. As I listened to my mp3 player with its uber-cool noise reduction headphones, I have to say I am thankful technology has come such a long way. From vinyl records to nifty mp3 players to gigantic headphones to miniature earplugs - there's been a sea of change to the sound of music, quite literally.

When you ask musicians of yore about their recordings, many of them recount tales of having to get the recording right all at one go. Artists like Lata Mangeshkar, Hemant Kumar, Asha Bhonsle, Kishore Kumar all weaved their magic working within the constraints of their time. Every member of the live orchestra had to get their part right or it meant scrapping the entire afternoon's work if one note was out of sync. This is a far stretch from today where you can record bits and sections of a song and put them together. Sometimes duets are sung separately and put together by techno whizzes who work in nifty little studios.

Some senior artists have suggested that because of the pressure to get things right the first time, skill and talent came into play. This however has been disputed and the way I see it, you cannot really draw comparisons across different situations and different factors at play. Something that Sunidhi Chauhan once pointed out in an interview came to mind when she suggested that today, there are days where artists record songs back to back, sometimes amounting to even 10 or 12 songs a day! So the circumstances are vastly different to yesteryears where an artist would have the luxury to learn a song for days and then go into a studio and record it. Even then, you have to admit that it is an admirable task that some of the best music ever emerged during those years where technology was still being developed.

Today old 45s are collector's items selling at high prices and you barely see the old gramophone unless you're displaying it in your house as an antique piece. Cassettes are almost redundant and God knows, I've had to let go (with lots of mourning and feelings of loss) so many tapes for the simple reason that I no longer own a cassette player! Compact Discs were the rage some decades ago and then once again technology caught up and said "Here's something better!" The MP3 made an appearance. Thereafter there's been no looking back. Music playing devices have been getting smaller and smaller and you can now walk around with over a 1000 songs if you choose to. It certainly beats lugging around heavy packs of cassettes and rewinding and forwarding (do we even remember that anymore?) to your favourite track.

Comments

[Chester Monroe]

MP3s are fine if you liked digital compressed music with so much loss of audio detail. Sampled bit rates must become higher for MP3s to compete.

If you do like MP3s, you could have easily converted your old cassette tapes and records into digital format with sound capturing and rendering software. Many people are converting their librairies over to digital format. They are doing likewise for video too - converting over old VHS to digital format and burning to DVD.

Chester