THIS IS A RECORDING

posted by James Reel

    During my vacation, I not only soaked up a great deal of Tuscan and Venetian scenery, drank too much wine, ate too much oily high-carb food, hiked up and down too many steep hilltown streets, and stared numbly at too much Gothic and Renaissance art; I managed to read six issues from my year-old-plus pile of New Yorkers. One item I thought may be of particular interest to you, assuming you didn’t read it in the summer of 2005 when it was fresh, is an insightful Alex Ross column on “how technology has transformed the sound of music”:

Music has achieved onrushing omnipresence in our world: millions of hours of its history are available on disk; rivers of digital melody flow on the Internet; MP3 players with ten thousand songs can be tucked in a back pocket or a purse. Yet, for most of us, music is no longer something we do ourselves, or even watch other people doing in front of us. It has become a radically virtual medium, an art without a face. In the future, … reproduction will replace production entirely. Zombified listeners will shuffle through the archives of the past, and new music will consist of rearrangements of the old.