Music has changed forever. Technology has brought such a revolutionary change in the way that music is created that it is now possible to create and generate sounds that were once impossible to create. Thanks to all the new electronic gear and virtual instruments, the amount of ways that you can now go about making music is countless and you longer need to follow the rules of making it. The first song that comes to my mind that brilliantly demonstrates all these new possibilities of making music is Excision and Wooli’s song titled ‘Lockdown ‘. It is a dubstep banger, that makes you bang your head, and shows you how technology has banged the conventional ways of making music at the same time.
Conventionally, one might think that we need real instruments to make music. But, to their surprise, there isn’t one of it in this song. In fact, all the sounds, including the drums, are either made from samples of real instruments or are synthesized using electronic synthesizers. Furthermore, traditional music theory is also no need to be followed as Musicians can now create emotion and variation using frequency modulation, and other technologically advanced processing tricks. For example, the gritty growly bases that we can hear during the drop were created in a virtual synthesizer using the technique called frequency modulation, which means to change the character of a sound by altering its frequency contents from the influence of another sound which has its own unique frequency content, and the technique called automation, which means adding effects to a sound gradually rather than at once. Excision and Wooli used frequency modulation to create a powerful gritty base, and then used automation to create rhythm and variation with time. This shows us how music has evolved from being a scientific phenomenon that relies on music theory to be a technological advancement that utilizes new techniques that we discussed above to create sounds that have never been heard before.
Knowing that music can now be made without using theory and real instruments is cool, but is it really that technologically advanced if you must still do physical work to play it back? Nothing too cool has happened to music after all… right? Wrong! Music as evolved so much that we don’t even have to physically play it anymore. For instance, in the song ‘lockdown’, there isn’t a single section in the song that was played manually. Instead, all the sounds in the song were sequenced inside a Digital Audio Workstation, a.k.a. DAW, which is a computer software that reads information about what kind of music you want to play and when. This means that once you have written all your data on your DAW software, the DAW software will play the song for you and all you must do is press play. So, good news to everyone, even though you can’t play music physically, you can still use your master mind to bring your musical ideas to life.
This is how music has changed over the years. Technology has made it easy, so that musicians don’t need to know how to play physically anymore. All one really needs today is a DAW software that can read information and utilize the tricks we discussed to make music. Thanks to Digital Audio Software, new talents have a chance to go beyond their limits and tap into their minds to make music that once was only a dream.
Works Cited
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qk39CcM7Qw
