Technology and Music

Over the last twenty years, with technology advancing and becoming more readily accessible to the general public, it has become much easier for music educators or music enthusiasts to view concerts or listen to multiple genres of music. With the addition of smartphones in our daily lives we can now YouTube any symphony that we desire and listen for hours on end. This is especially helpful in the realm of teaching as well. Music educators can now very easily assign listenings to his or her students and can expect that the homework will be done effectively due to smartphones being prevalent in their students’ lives. With the internet at a student’s fingertips he or she can easily look up music they need to perform or even look up genres of music that are foreign to them. A well rounded musician knows the ins and outs of most genres of music and can define them, with the use of the internet in your hands, a student can learn more quickly than ever before.

Smartphones are not the only technology that is assisting the music field. Recording software is a huge technological advancement that allows music to be captured and recorded for future purposes. Whether you want to record your schools Step Team in action, your garage bands new song, the London Symphony, or yourself messing around on a piano, recordings are the most important tool a musician can have. Constantly recording your playing will allow you to reflect on the goods and bads. You can make modifications to your playing due to what you hear to get the best overall result. This is also important in a school setting. If you are directing a concert band and you need show the trumpet section that they are too loud and need to play softer, but they refuse to believe they are playing too loudly, you can record that particular section of the song and play it back to them. In order to better yourself as a musician and to train your ear, constantly making recordings is vitally important.  

In the field of Music, in any setting, (i.e., rock band, concert band, professional orchestra, solo, and even dance) technology over the past twenty years has greatly impacted the way we listen, play, and communicate our sounds to others. Now we can watch a live performance of that rock show you couldn’t go see, fall asleep to the recorded sounds of nature, or even show a friend that song you’ve been working on for a while and ask for help. Recording music, discovering music, and creating music are all much simpler now because of the technology that exists today. I’m very eager to know how technology will assist musicians in the upcoming years, but only time will tell.