How New Technology Leads To New Music!

A lot of innovation is accidental. Because a piece of technology ends up in experimental hands, because people start looking for the extremes. You can definitely say that for the Roland 303. The Roland basscomputer was intended to be a bass accompaniment for guitarists while practising alone. Untill artists started doing other stuff with it. And became the basis of a whole new genre: house music! This documentary is somewhere between radio and tv but tells the whole story!

Two record players was all the original hiphop crews needed. They used them in an innovative way. They didn’t play complete tracks, they played small bits from records, repeating them by using two recordplayers and two identical records. Later came the sampler that made cutting up, repeating and mixing bits of music easy. Thanks to the sampler there are 6 seconds of drums from the past that we all know. Another Nate Harrison narrated video.

After the sampler came the computer. But not immediately did we have good working sequencers and other software. The originators had to do a lot themselves. For example, New Order had to program the bassline of Blue Monday with their own binary code. This documentary gives a nice insight of the making of a classic. “We wanted to make new music by using new instruments and take the old one step further.”

Computers and the internet have changed all aspects of music. From production to promotion to sales to distribution. Music is digital now. And everything digital can be copied easily. And because you can copy and therefore re-use every bit of text, image, sound or video, that’s what happens. And that leads to new material, new creativity, new genres. Art has always built on work of the past, but in a digital word that’s what literally happens. This is a must see documentary about intellectual property in a digital world.