Music and Technology: A Very Short Introduction

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