A piece of What I love

Audio has come a long way in the past 150 due to the rapid growth in technology. Music in particular has gone from only being accessible at your local concert hall, to almost everyone being able to access any song they want at just a click of a button.

Music carries a lot of different messages and especially within the different ways we can listen to music, different messages can be taken away. In the early 1900s, music was only really accessible if you played an instrument or went to a concert. Not long after, vinyl records were available for your average person, allowing people to bring music into their homes. The cassette tape was the next development in how people listened to music as well as listening on the radio. In the late 1970s, Sony developed “the Walkman”, a portable device to listen to cassette tapes. Within a period of 50 years, the consumption of music and how people listened to it had dramatically changed. It wasn’t until MTV released the first music video in 1981, that changed the way we look at music. With the development of TV, the first music video, ironically was called “Video killed the radio star” by The Buggles.

This now meant that music had a face, a visual way to express itself, a different way to carry a message. With MTV being a 24 music channel, musical television soon became a popular way we consumed music and now doubt had an effect on the popularity of vinyl records, cassette tapes and radio. Following this, in the later 1900s and early 2000s, the development of CDs and mp3 (eg. The Walkman for CDs and iPod) became increasingly popular.

Recently, our world in many ways has converted to being online, with almost anything we want at the end of our finger tips. Streaming and buying music has become an increasing phenomenon, almost putting CDs out of fashion. In our day an age, listening to music on Spotify or YouTube is the easiest form of accessing any music whenever we want.

I still find that physical CDs are my favourite way to listen to music. Not to say that I don’t listen to Spotify or YouTube, but I find that with CDs, you can feel that a journey that has been complete. What I love about CDs, is that you a have a physical result of months of hard work. Each CD has however many songs on it, all relating to the title of the album, for example Maroon 5’s debut album “Songs about Jane”. The songs tell a story about the title and what the artist wanted to communicate at the time. Although you can still listen to albums online, it’s not the same when you can just select any song from that album and listen to it. When you have a physcial CD, you have a certain amount of songs, ordered in a particular way and that’s how you listened. That’s how you experience what the artist wants you to experience, and it adds an extra dimension to what you feel when you listen. I could spend hours in a CD store, much like a book lover can lose track of time in a book store. It’s a really beautiful way to express music and certainly my favourite.

#audio #music