The effect of technology on music has never been greater than in the last 50 years. Earlier this century, music had an audience that was limited to the presence of a performer - you had to actually ATTEND A PERFORMANCE to hear music played if you didn't have an instrument or play music at home. Simply the idea of taking sound, much less a musical performance, and being able to replicate it and re-play it at a different time and location was unheard of. From the wax cylinder to the phonograph to magnetic tape to digital storage, the knowledge of capturing and reproducing sound has been around for barely over 100 years! With the progressing ability to record, re-record, and to edit musical performances, the expectations of the audience changed as well. Never before has the listening public expected anything less from recorded music than something that can almost never be performed: perfection. Even with the most amount of production and the best performers in the world, only under the guise of true inspiration can someone perform flawlessly for over an hour; yet this is what we all expect from our recordings.

Even with the ability to edit a performance, it was still a challenge for a band or ensemble to perform at it's best in a few takes, much less with a high-quality sound. This is where the invention of multi-track recording changed things yet again. Not only did it allow the separation of instruments and voices only to be combined afterwards in the as-yet-unknown "mixing" process, it also allowed a SINGLE person to perform the parts of many people. The concept of "if you want it done right, do it yourself" finally was able to be executed. This spawned yet another uncommon anomaly: the multi-instrumentalist. Today's musician is almost EXPECTED to songwrite, perform, and record their own material by themselves. This has spread the musician's focus to many areas instead of simply one, as has (arguably) created less-than-great specialist musicians, but better overall musicianship.

Another major influence on music is electronics. Previous to 1950, you could fairly easily identify and categorize a musical sound you heard to a particular instrument. Violins, trumpets, pianos, drums, etc. - these were all specific sounds you could count on being pretty much the same from player to player. With the advent of the synthesizer in the 1960's and sampling in the 1980's, the palette of the musician suddenly multiplied infinitely. Even to this day, we are still exploring the possibilities of sounds we have created for ourselves through the use of electronics, and even more so in digital electronics. The lines of expectation blurred and the ear became a playground for textures of piercing highs and colon-rumbling lows that no other instrument or device was capable of producing up to that point. Electronic tinkerers like Bob Moog suddenly became musical Prometheus' - and to this day we're still figuring out how to use it right.

Alongside all of these changes is a basic law: "Technology doubles in speed and halves in price every 18 months". The $500,000 recording studios of the 1970's are available on our desktops today for $1,000 with better quality audio and more capabilities. The common everyday household Jones can become an overnight techno success with his PC. Has this made music better in general, or has it simply brought bad and underdeveloped musicians on an even keel with the rest of the world? In some ways it adds to the overload of garbage that has made this era the Information Age, but in other ways it brings never-before realized musical talents to the ears of those who probably would never have heard it in the first place.