Yesterday I wrote about the digital circus surrounding the introduction of digital audio: the world is ending, our health and lives at stake, and all the insanity that followed as we tried to figure out how to make a bad sounding format better.
But that level of hysteria that often accompanies new technology isn't just a modern invention. We've been at it since time immemorial. Take the first introduction of recorded music. Now that was really bad sounding because of the technical limitations of that day—everything was piped in and out with big horns.
Mechanical horns couldn't capture bass frequencies. String basses were replaced with tubas because the recording equipment could handle tubas. Drums became woodblocks. Violins, in one contemporary description, turned into "a pathetic and ghostly murmur." The promise of capturing music was real. What actually came out of the process was a pale, narrow, often unrecognizable version of what went in.
And this led to the inevitable circus act.
In 1906, John Philip Sousa — one of America's greatest composers and bandleaders, the man who wrote "Stars and Stripes Forever" — looked at this miraculous and compromised technology and wrote an essay called "The Menace of Mechanical Music." People would stop singing. Children would stop learning instruments. There would be no reason to practice when a machine could simply play for you. He predicted vocal cords might eventually atrophy from disuse. The Library of Congress still has the essay. Sousa was not a crank. He cared as deeply about music as anyone alive.
He heard a real problem and magnified the impacts to the point of real fear.
The magnificent irony is that he was completely wrong about the outcome. Recording didn't destroy music — it created an explosion of music nobody in 1906 could have imagined. Genres that didn't exist. Artists reaching audiences across continents. A recorded heritage that has become inseparable from how human civilization works.
And yet his concerns about passive consumption and the economics of musicianship? We're still arguing versions of those today.
Predictions about transformative technology tend to be simultaneously perceptive and catastrophically wrong about the actual outcome. The passion that drove Sousa to predict the death of music is the same passion that drives every one of us who cares about what recorded music can and can't do.
There was a real problem. Then we extrapolated it until it could destroy everything.
We'll meet that pattern one more time tomorrow.
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