And I’ve been around for more than half of this!
Here’s a fun little timeline of influential music technologies I put together and have been thinking about:
(-152 years) Microphone
(-150 years) Phonograph
(-128 years) Loudspeaker
(-120 years) Vacuum Tube Amplifier
(-94 years) Electric Guitar
(-78 years) Sound-on-sound recording
(-78 years) Vinyl LP
(-71 years) Programmable Synthesizer
(-70 years) Multitrack Tape Recording
(-65 years) Drum Machine
(-52 years) Turntable DJ-ing
(-47 years) Cassette Walkman
(-47 years) Digital Audio Sampling
(-43 years) MIDI (musical instrument digital interface)
(-37 years) Multitrack Hard Disk Recording
(-35 years) Compact Disc
(-31 years) Cloud music storage
(-28 years) Autotune
(-18 years) Streaming music
(-17 years) Smartphone Music Creation
(-5 years) Blockchain/NFT music distribution
(-3 years) Generative AI music
—
Some thoughts:
My great grandparents were alive to see the start of this music technology revolution.
My parents were alive to see the start of multitrack tape recording.
I have been alive to witness more than half of these milestones (what??).
My kids have only known a world with mobile phones and streaming music.
What are YOUR takeaways from this? What have I missed?
If any of my friends and followers would like to try and create a more visually interesting version of this timeline, I would welcome it! I made a few attempts myself but was not happy with any of the results…