Music and Technology: A Very Short Introduction

Very Short Introductions #710

by Mark Katz

Mark Katz surveys the age-old interrelationship between music and technology, from prehistoric musical instruments to today's digital playback devices.

This Very Short Introduction takes an expansive and inclusive approach meant to broaden and challenge traditional views of music and technology. In its most common use, "music technology" tends to evoke images of twentieth and twenty-first century electronic devices: synthesizers, recording
equipment, music notation software, and the like. This volume, however, treats all tools used to create, store, reproduce, and transmit music--new or old, electronic or not--as technologies worthy of investigation. All musical instruments can be considered technologies. The modern piano, for
example, is a marvel of keys, hammers, strings, pedals, dampers, and jacks; just the sound-producing mechanism, or action, on a piano has more than 50 different parts.

In this broad view, technology in music encompasses instruments, whether acoustic, electric or electronic; engraving and printing; sound recording and playback; broadcasting; software; and much more. Mark Katz challenges the view that technology is unnatural, something external to music. It was
sometimes said in the early twentieth century that so-called mechanical music (especially player pianos and phonographs) was a menace to "real" music; alternatively, technology can be freighted with utopian hopes and desires, as happens today with music streaming platforms like Spotify. Positive or
negative, these views assume that technology is something that acts upon music; by contrast, this volume characterizes technology as an integral part of all musical activity and portrays traditional instruments and electronic machines as equally technological.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Technology

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[Douglass Gaking · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have only read one other book in this Oxford series, so I don't have much to compare to, but as I read this I was shocked that I was reading something from this series. Katz attacks common assumptions that musicians and listeners make about music technology. He bounces between the Western art music tradition, ethnomusicology, and contemporary music, including obscure genres. As I read, I kept pulling up tracks on Youtube and was fascinated by several tracks I had never heard before. This book is illuminating and something that I–as a music educator and composer/arranger–will keep near my desk and reference often.

[Tuomas Auvinen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A concise, yet profound and multi-faceted introduction to the study of music technology. Despite the page count, all fundamentally relevant perspectives are discussed. Furthermore, concrete examples include accounts from around the world and from different kinds of cultural and social settings.

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent VSI, with some fun discussions of the intersection of music and technology, such as the implications of the rise of karaoke in Brazil or the Cuban sneakernet used to carry music throughout an island with shitty internet. But when he gets all woke, Katz’s arguments become weaker.

[tinaathena]

I always find it a bit much pressure when someone loans me a book unbidden, but this was interesting for a topic I don’t really give that much thought to.