Final Post

We feel as though our blog does a great job at giving an overview and goes into some specifics on how the world of music has been changed by digital technology.  We learned quite a bit by doing this project.  From how sound is now recorded and manipulated to why the war against piracy warrants so much attention, we discovered some pretty cool facts regarding our project.

In our proposal we had said that we wanted to talk with professor Wiley Ross here at the University of Arizona who is an expert in music recording; however, despite many attempts to contact him we were unable to to pose questions about music recording to him.  Despite not being able to speak with him, there is still some great information on our blog regarding digital recording.

Our survey results were pretty illuminating, and we feel as though we gave a pretty comprehensive break down of the data we gathered.  Also, we had blog posts that hit the other areas that we discussed in our project proposal.  Someone with very limited knowledge of music in the digital age could learn a considerable amount by visiting our blog, which was a fun and interesting project to work on.

If we were to continue this project, we would love to talk to professionals of the topics involved in our project and get a sense of their expert opinions.  We would also give our survey to a much larger sample size of people to see if our results are consistent.

Digitizing the Musical Performance

The primary way that the digital revolution has effected the field of music performance is that it has given artists the ability to change their sound almost effortlessly whenever they want.  This ability has given rise to many new types of music and is a large part of almost every band in recent years.  Have you ever been to a concert or watched one on TV and thought that the stage looked almost like a computer control room? Did you ask yourself what is all that technology doing on the stage.  What are all those boxes and control panels, and what is that thing that the lead guitarist keeps stepping on?  The answer can be summed up with two words: digital effects.  All of those fancy toys on stage are what gives the band their sound, and they reconfigure them or use different effects for almost every song.  With the stomp of a foot a guitarist can change from a sweet, pure tone (think John Mayer's Gravity) to heavy, aggressive, over-driven sound (think Back in Black by AC/DC) simply because the technology allows for the change in the sound.  One of the most famous guitarists known for his use of effects in his playing is The Edge from the legendary band U2, and in the following video he discusses how greatly an awesome effect can add style and overall coolness to his music.  This is a great example of how digital effects have made an impact on the performance of music.

Music Survey Results

As part of our project we wanted to know how people were getting their music and how often, so we decided to survey a group of fifty people of differing ages and posed these questions: How old are you? How do you primarily obtain your music? How often do you obtain music?  The following graphs and charts show our results which we thought were surprising.  The first chart shows how many surveyors we had in each of the shown age groups.  The next charts show how each age group obtains their music, followed by how often.  The last chart shows the percentage of all surveyors that get their music illegally.  Take a look... 

 

As you can see almost half of our surveyors get their music illegally, which was a big surprise.  We knew that illegally downloading was a big problem, we just didn't know how big.  The numbers, however, do not lie.

Ways The Digital Music Takeover Has Helped The Industry

Times have changed and so has music. No longer is music bound to the device they were recorded to like with the old analog style. Instead, with advances in digital technology, our generation can enjoy the efficiency of easily transferring our audio to most of our generation’s favorite players (computer, iPod, MP3s, iPad, etc.) through its binary code system that coagulates with almost all modern music playing devices. This makes for great storage on multiple devices as well, especially after you have successfully transferred your digital audio to a computer where you can simply move remove your hard drive or flash drive and move it to another computer at will. With most digital media players, like computers and iPods, you can compile a library of all your favorite songs and reach them at will with only a few button clicks. The preservation of music is no longer a hassle either. With digital audio, that wear and tear you had to worry about with cassettes and records of yesteryear is gone because with CDs and MP3s you can easily transfer your music to your computer and if you happen to scratch your favorite CD, you can simply get on your computer and make a new copy of it! All these advantages make one wonder what music would be like if only we had discovered this before cassettes and records ever came around.  Either way, the fact remains that digital music revolution has changed the music industry and the listening world immensely for the better.