Kipper was slacking in his beanbag with an I-pod plugged into his ears. While other canines of his age were chasing fast cars, he was going GaGa over Snoop Dogg. Was his fascination with music plain dog-gone crazy or was there something deeper beneath the surface.
His eyes thoughtlessly veered towards the picture of his ancestor, Nipper, hanging on the wall. He looked closely at it and noticed something was amiss. As if his late, great and sedate ancestor was hypnotized by something that was missing. Kipper instinctively went towards the picture frame, took it down and turned it around. He noticed a secret storage space. Kipper dug his paw into it and felt around, similar to when you pick your nose. He finally struck gold and pulled at it. Out came a stack of cards, the size of a postcard. Each had a picture with a writing on the back.
The first card at the top of the stack captured Kipper’s attention immediately. It was the very same picture of his ancestor, Nipper, that had been framed. Only, there was a slight difference. There also was a large device with a loudspeaker mounted on top of a square platform made of wood. It was as if Nipper was mesmerized by the device or what was coming out if it. Kipper looked at the other postcards as well and realised that these were his ancestors. With a child-like curiosity (not the one that killed the cat!), he went through each card and this is what he discovered…
“I didn’t want to be away from the voice of my master. There is little else a dog can do. However, master was an artist who used to stay put in the confines of his room for several hours working to create magic with his brush strokes. Then one day he bought something called a phonograph cylinder. This device could record sound on wax grooves and then play it back. However, it could only play about 4 minutes of sound and be used a few hundred times after which it would become garbage. I was looking for something bigger and better. And Edison duly obliged again with the gramophone.
The 78s and 33s put bum back into the word album. Not only could I now listen to my master, play fetch with him using the black discs, but I also got introduced to a whole new world of music with its variety of genres.- be it rock n’ roll, jazz or classical. Suddenly artist’s had to come out with albums, string of songs that could tell a story. However, with the introduction of the 45s, singles came back into vogue. But, there was a saviour on the horizon for the album generation- The Cassette.
Strangely 78, 33 and 45 are multiples of 3. Is it coincidence or something more?“
“The cassettes did to music what Michael Jackson did to art of creating music videos. Make it mainstream. The LPs were a connoisseur’s delight and the radio couldn’t play what the listener wanted. But the cassettes were easier to store, modify and above all bloody comfortable to carry around. It probably also laid the foundations for music piracy as it was simple to copy and edit a tape. On the flipside, the concept of mix tapes also came into being: having an assortment of your favourite songs on a single tape.
In 1979, Sony laid its footprint across the globe as the first Walkman went on sale and with it people were also introduced to Japan’s philosophy of miniaturization of high-end technology. With the Walkman, music could follow you wherever you went just like the little pug is supposed to. I could now jog in the mornings to the music of Van Halen.
The Walkman laid the foundations for the one-thousand-songs-in-a-pocket lifestyle, even though at the expense of great sound quality. It changed music lovers from discerning listeners to habitual users.”
“Norio Ohga would have brought a smile to Beethoven’s face. At least he did to mine. I could now hear 74 minutes of Beethoven’s entire 9th symphony without any breaks. It was made possible by the Compact Disk. Norio Ohga, who aspired to be an opera singer as a young man, joined Sony in 1959 after serving as a part-time advisor for some years. Ohga identified the CD as a viable medium for storing music. He wanted it to have the capacity to hold Beethoven’s entire 9th symphony.“
“In the 1990s, computer programmers found a way to shrink the size of digital audio files without losing too much of their quality. It was called the MPEG-1 audio layer 3. In 1999, a college kid named Shawn Fanning launched a file sharing site called Napster which allowed users to share MP3 files. Shawn wanted “to take down the recording industry and give away free stuff”. Recording companies battled back with copyright infringement lawsuits. But the digital revolution it unleashed brought a once-mighty recording industry to its knees. “I changed the music industry for better and for always.” It is because of these sharing networks that the recording industry doesn’t decide what we listen to anymore.”
“Now I lay back in my bean bag knowing that my ancestors enjoyed music as much as I do. I no more feel like a square peg trying to fit into a circular hole.
Having seen how the generations before me listened to the recorded sound, I realise that the wizard in the black mock turtle neck and blue jeans, with a wave of his wand, has accomplished a great feat by porting all our music onto a pocket sized object. And you might think this is the end. But wait, the next wave of music is here where we have busting communities and anyone can open Pandora’s box and Spotify his or her favourite songs from a sound cloud of a million tracks. Will streaming transform music to something that is only experienced and not owned? Think about it while I listen to my favourite day of the week”
