How Technology Has Shaped Music

by Michael Magee

Music and technology have always been undeniably linked, but the relationship between the two has changed since electronics have become a part of the picture. Increasingly, since the 80’s especially, the majority of popular music is created using synthesizers, samplers, and computers. In the early days of electronic music, these instruments were primarily used as tools applied to existing forms of music, with German the electronic band Kraftwerk being a notable exception. Kraftwerk represented a trend in music where technology, through its limitations, has shaped, controlled, and changed our music significantly.

Turntables

One of the earlier uses of technology which predates the heavy usage of synthesizers and samplers in the mainstream features a much older piece of technology: the turntable. Most famously, it played a pivotal role in the creation of hip hop music. Typically, DJs would use only one turntable, but when disco parties became more prevalent, two were used so that music could play non stop. Then in the 70’s, New york DJs like Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash popularized the break mix; drum breaks (parts of old funk, soul and rock songs where there was no singing) were mixed into each other repeatedly, providing a long, continuous beat which dancers could enjoy (in fact, this is the meaning of the word breakdancer). This way of DJing allowed people to rap on top of the continuous beat, and evolved into the hip hop and rap music that we know today. This piece of tech has been accredited to other genres too. Jump forward a few years and people were changing the speed setting on their turntables while house records were playing, resulting in the more energetic genres of dance music, such as “hardcore” in the UK or “gabber” in The Netherlands. These genres evolved into the now globally popular drum and bass and hardstyle.

Synthesizers and Drum Machines

Electronic dance music in general is perhaps the most popular of all modern music. An escapist form of music with roots in socially and financially disadvantaged groups from large American cities like New York, Chicago and Detroit, dance music’s evolution can be traced from disco, where synthesizers began to be used in combination with the relentless 4-on-the-floor drum beat, to house music, where drum machines came into the picture. The most popular drum machines were produced by a company called Roland, and were initially a commercial flop due to their fake and flimsy sound. They quickly went out of production as a result and were sold cheaply in pawn shops where they were accessible to poorer customers from the ghettos of America. They functioned using a sequencer; like an ancient music box with notches on the cylinder triggering sounds of a certain pitch, certain voltages within a drum machine would trigger specific drum sounds stored on the device which were either sampled from real drums or created using synthesizers. As a result, the seemingly endless drum beats of disco became well and truly endless, and parties could go on for longer and longer with the music becoming more and more hypnotic, no longer relying on the endurance of the drummer in the disco band.

The Roland 808 drum machine © Electronic Beats

Synthesizers also used a sequencer to produce similar repetitive trance inducing melodies. The Roland TB303 Bassline is perhaps one of the most pivotal synthesizers to be heard in dance music. Like the drum machines, it was a flop due to its plastic and artificial sound, and was considered to be useless for its intended function, namely to produce bass noises. When it was picked up by house musicians, they created a new genre of music: acid house. With a melody playing automatically on the 303, musicians could twist the knobs and create a variety of evolving otherworldly noises, which in combination with the Roland 808 drum machine, produced a strange and futuristic sound never heard before, and far removed from the disco roots.

The famous Acid House synthesizer: The Roland TB303

This futurism developed over the years in Detroit as well as in Chicago, and it was in the former where techno music came to be.

Samplers

In 1987, the EMU SP1200 sampler was released. This was initially used in hip hop, at first by Marley Marl, who sampled his favourite drum breaks and then used the samplers function to “chop” the break. This meant that the snare or kick drum could be isolated and then rearranged at will, providing endless possibilities to create new breakbeats. This same function was applied to the sped up breakbeats used in UK hardcore to produce wild, unpredictable, and aggressive drum sequences emblematic of jungle music.

Sometimes samples were “boosted” through studio equipment like samplers, meaning that drum sounds could be distorted beyond recognition providing new harmonics to basic drum sounds from, for example a clean 808 kick drum. This gave Dutch gabber music its aggressive edge.

Modern Limits

With the computing power of modern music software, the limits of technology have almost disappeared. More or less any sound can be made through modern sound synthesis, with most modern dance music being made on audio programs such as Ableton or Logic Pro. Giant synthesizers of the past, with their cables and inputs galore, can now be imitated by a small laptop with the right software on board. This ease of accessibility and excess of possibility has, for some producers, apparently caused a change in music making methods and now a trend has appeared wherein people are looking to go back to using old technologies like the ones mentioned above.

A large array of modular synthesizers and a software synthesizer © Rolling Stone

Other machines that can deliver the same sounds are becoming accessible to the average bedroom producer, with their vintage limitations providing a boundary within which some people feel more at ease making music, instead of experiencing the musicians equivalent of information overload. So, with musicians having gotten tired of the endless possibilities of digital technology, they have now decided to go back to a simpler time, and a simpler methodology, much like the DJ choosing vinyl over CD players or the photographer choosing analog over digital cameras. This begs the question: has our desire for innovative technology in art exhausted itself?