How Music Works summary

In 1878, the first music recording was made, freeing music from its live, real-time context. This has had a massive impact on both how music is made and experienced.

As recording became a ubiquitous practice, it changed how we played instruments and sang. For example, bands had to play at a more precise tempo as unsteady tempos sounded sloppier without the “distraction” of a performance’s visual element. The result was that players had to learn to play to an internal metronome.

The invention of digital technology was an unforeseen consequence of phone-related research by Bell Labs. In 1962, the researchers figured out how to digitize sound by dividing sound waves into “slices” that could be translated into ones and zeros. This has greatly affected music’s sonic quality and its composition.

When a digital sound recording is made, the audio gets divided into a finite number of slices. We perceive these slices as a continuous audio spectrum even though the sound is made of distinct steps.

Recording music isn’t just about capturing the sound of a band or musician. It’s an art in itself, one that affects music immensely. And, as with most other art forms, you can combine different ways of recording, each with its pros and cons.

First, there’s the divide-and-isolate approach to recording, where the producer and recording engineer bear a huge responsibility for how the record ultimately sounds. In the late 1970s, this was the prevalent way of recording music: isolating each instrument to get as clean a sound as possible.

Collaborating has always played an important role in music creation. Just think of the many renowned and respected songwriting duos like Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards.

Popular as ever, nowadays collaboration doesn’t even require the collaborators to be in the same country. Instead, collaboration can be based on transferring digital music files back and forth between the musicians.

Record sales have suffered a steep decline since 1999 due to the changing landscape of music distribution.With the rise of digital distribution, record sales have decreased drastically and today only very few artists are able to live off of their record sales alone.

Consider the fact that, of all albums released in 2009, only 2.1 percent sold over 5,000 copies. And in 2006, only 35 of the albums released sold more than one million copies within the calendar year. By 2010, the number was down to ten.

When it comes to enjoying live music, one major part of the experience is the venue. Sometimes a vibrant music scene can even start evolving around a specific venue. Take, for instance, New York’s CBGB,  which went from being a biker bar to the backdrop of an emergent musical scene in 1974.

Actually, through a few converging factors, a vibrant music scene can emerge from any venue.

For a very long time, arts teaching and funding wasn’t aimed at fostering creativity among the general population, otherwise known as “the amateurs.”

With the advent of sound recording, music education shifted its focus from teaching students how to create music to how they should understand music, with a special emphasis on certain “superior” kinds of music.

Music, it seems, has always been an essential part of human life.

Some theories claim that music originated with the non-verbal sounds mothers make to their children, while others connect music to sounds in nature or animal noises. But, although theories about music’s origins vary, all agree that it emerged the same time people did.

The key message in this book:

Music is deeply dependent on its context, be it the specific venue where it’s played, the way it’s been recorded, or the digital technology used to create it. But what always remains the same is music’s importance to us as human beings: it can bring us together and be a self-empowering tool. And, with modern technology and a music business that’s more flexible than ever, there are countless ways to get music out into the world.