Innovation = The Future. Just

¶ … Innovation = the Future. Just one glimpse at the history of the technology of music tells us that Alvin Toffler is correct: the past and innovation certainly equal the future, although whether that future is preferable to the past is arguable. Three centuries ago, the daughter was still playing piano in her mother's drawing room. Along came Edison with his phonograph in 1877. The phonograph was intended, according to Edison, for recording contracts and business letters, but the future of music intended it to be used otherwise.

It was the first 'technical' instrument in the history of the technology of music. The phonograph changed music in more ways than one. Songwriters shortened their compositions so that they would measure to the size of the record.

Singers worked on their voice projection and enunciation; and just as had occurred with the aegis of the publishing industry when people awakened to the diversity of books that flooded the market, so too with the music industry: listeners now became more knowledgeable than ever of the quantity of music titles available for them. The phonograph changed styles and converted people, who had not been so before, into music lovers.

Piano sales fell, and instead of people grouped around the player clunking on her piano, they were now craned over the horns of their Victrolas Since then technological innovations have changed the course of music every quarter of a century or so, and, doing so, have altered the future, at least as far as music is concerned. In the mid 1920s, for instance, electrical recording -- which made for clearer recording -- paved the way for Bing Crosby and others to introduce the new sound called pop.

After World War II, further innovations led to a dramatic change in the future - so dramatic that Elektra Records founder Jack Holzman called these changes the "Big Bang." The impetus was tape recording; the long-playing, high fidelity record; and FM radio and the results were sonic experimentation and an unprecedented hubris of experimentation with new and different music styles (not all pleasant and comforting to the traditional listener). The World Wide Web has wreaked its own cataclysmic changes.

For $500, an aspiring musician can turn his laptop into a studio, whilst music -- tons of it -- can be garnered for free from over the web, and musicians can disseminate tunes without interference from record companies through e-mails and file-sharing programs. All of this originated just from Edison's phonograph. One invention was securely placed on the footing of another, until one reaches a climax where technology has so changed music that the computer, when compared to the piano, are worlds (as indeed they are) apart.

The future is still on the march, and those believing that the past + innovation = future, claim that the whole idea of popular music could itself be transformed into something that is utterly new. Pioneering synthesizer designer Roger Linn, for instance, suggests that individuals will 'learn' how to play the computer -- creating rhythms and melodies.