How technology changed music

For almost all of human history, listening to music meant that a musician was playing in front of you. Many 19th-century music lovers heard a Beethoven symphony only a handful of times in their lives, or discovered it by playing it themselves in a piano reduction. Today millions of tracks fit in a phone. In between, a series of inventions transformed not only the way we listen, but music itself.

1. Print: the score becomes a product

In 1501 in Venice Ottaviano Petrucci published the first collection of polyphony printed with movable type. Written music could now circulate in many copies. In the 19th century lithography and the rise of the family piano made sheet music a huge market: every opera hit was arranged for piano, every fashionable song sold as sheet music. Ragtime and Tin Pan Alley songs sold hundreds of thousands of copies: people "bought" a piece of music in order to play it themselves.

2. Recorded sound (1877–1925)

In 1877 Thomas Edison recorded and played back the human voice on a cylinder: the phonograph was born. In 1887 Emil Berliner patented the gramophone, which plays a flat disc that is easy to mass-produce: the record industry began. But recording was acoustic: musicians played in front of a large horn that passed the vibrations straight to the cutting stylus. Powerful instruments (brass, operatic voices) came through well; violins and piano did not. One side of a 78 rpm record lasted about three minutes: that is where the length of the popular song comes from.

The player piano, with its perforated rolls, enjoyed its golden age at the same time: it preserved performances by famous pianists, and composers such as Debussy, Ravel and Joplin recorded rolls.

3. The microphone and radio (1920s)

In 1920 regular public radio broadcasts began in Pittsburgh; within a few years music entered every home, for free. Around 1925 electrical recording with a microphone replaced the horn: sound became far more faithful. The microphone changed singing: there was no longer any need to fill a hall, you could murmur. This was the birth of the crooners. Radio also spread jazz, blues and tango far beyond their home cities.

4. Magnetic tape and the LP (1935–1960)

Magnetic tape, developed in Germany in the 1930s and widespread after the war, made it possible to cut, splice and redo a take. A recording was no longer necessarily a single continuous performance. In 1948 the 33⅓ rpm long-playing record (LP) held about twenty minutes per side: a whole symphony could be heard almost without interruption. The 45 rpm single (1949) became the format for hits, and the jukebox the soundtrack of cafés. In the late 1950s stereo placed instruments in space. Pierre Schaeffer, for his part, turned tape into a composing tool: musique concrète (1948).

5. The multitrack studio and the synthesizer (1955–1980)

Guitarist Les Paul was one of the pioneers of layered recording (overdubbing). With multitrack tape recorders, each instrument is recorded separately and then mixed: the studio becomes an instrument. The Beatles recorded Sgt. Pepper (1967) on four-track machines, with countless edits. Some classical musicians made the same choice: pianist Glenn Gould gave up concerts in 1964 to devote himself to the studio. In 1964 Robert Moog presented a keyboard-controlled modular synthesizer; in the 1970s synthesizers and drum machines entered pop. The cassette (1963) and then the Walkman (1979) made music portable.

6. Digital (since 1980)

• 1982: the CD, developed by Philips and Sony, brought digital sound into the home.
• 1983: the MIDI standard let keyboards, synthesizers and computers talk to each other. It is thanks to MIDI that your keyboard can talk to this site!
• The sampler records any sound and plays it back from a keyboard; hip-hop composes from snippets of records.
• The computer became a complete studio: you can record, edit and mix at home.
• 1990s–2000s: MP3 and the internet. Music lost its physical form; file sharing (Napster, 1999) shook the industry, then came online stores, YouTube (2005) and streaming (Spotify launched in 2008).

What technology changed in music