History
Every era changed what a musician could do, and every era was questioned. Move through the timeline and watch the line change shape.
Antiquity onward
Acoustic instruments
1 · Antiquity onward
Sound was made by bodies, breath, wood, skin, and string.
2 · 9th century onward
Music could be stored on a page and performed by strangers.
3 · Late 1800s onward
A single performance became a permanent object.
4 · 1930s onward
Amplification turned a signal into a sound of its own.
5 · 1960s–1970s
Knobs, filters, and waveforms produced sounds that never existed.
6 · 1970s–1980s
Rhythm could be programmed rather than performed.
7 · 1983 onward
Instruments learned a shared language of instruction.
8 · 1980s onward
Existing recordings became raw musical material.
9 · 1980s onward
Timing could be corrected to a mathematical grid.
10 · 1990s onward
A voice could be tuned after it was sung.
11 · 1990s onward
The studio moved inside a computer.
12 · 2000s onward
An orchestra could be loaded from a hard drive.
13 · 2020s
A sentence could produce a nearly complete musical object.
14 · Now
Human intention becomes the organizing instrument, and the human remains accountable.