When athletic height jumping was considered done and perfected, there was the Fosbury flop which opened new possibilities. Do you think there was such a moment in the music history? When someone showed how things can be done and from there everyone is using his/her technique?
Equal temperament, where all the keys have basically the same intervals rather than having different characters as in just intonation. Enabled modulation from one key to another as in Bach and Jazz.
A few modern production techniques come close, but I agree, equal temperament tuning was a game changer. It allowed “anyone” to transpose “any” piece of music into “any” key, broadening the available instruments for a piece.
Plus drop D tuning would be impossible without it.
This is maybe obscure but Earl Scruggs basically invented three finger picking on the banjo. It became one of the defining characteristics of bluegrass music and when most people imagine “banjo music” today, that’s probably what they imagine first. (It’s called “Scruggs Style” and he popularized but who knows who did it first as a lark?)
A recent one is abusing autotune. Autotune was invented to correct singing notes that were slightly off. Cher was apparently first to do this but people started experimenting with unintended settings combinations to make different effects and stuff. T-Pain took that to the extreme and it became a whole trend in pop music.
Plus, like, the entire history of music in New Orleans and the surrounding Mississippi Delta region. So much American (and British) music can trace a direct line to the blues, jazz, early rock and roll, and other genres that begin in the region.
- Jamaican dub. The concept of the engineer as artist and producer and also the idea of remixing comes from dub, which was invented by people like King Tubby and Lee Scratch Perry. The way most modern genres are produced (by a creative audio engineer, without a band) originated from dub.
If you’re ever inclined to say more about this (dub/producer as artist) please do it here?
Fascinated by this.
Here’s a really good podcast episode from 99% Invisible about this exact topic.
Sorry mate, I don´t have the energy for that, I recommend the Wikipedia article on Dub.
No worries.
Actually this podcast on the topic was recommended by another kind user here: https://lemmy.world/comment/7957387
Thanks for planting the seed it’s been fun to learn about this.
Sweet, take care out there.
Off topic: Hey does anyone know how I can tag a user in lemmy?
There have been lots of technological advancements which led to revolutions in music. The electric guitar, multi-track mixing, synthesizers, etc.
Each of them brought with them while new genres of music.
You didn’t even mention the biggest technological leap; recording. Being able to capture music and play it at one’s will fundamentally changed virtually everything about music.
So many great examples in this thread already, so I’m going to go with a simpler one: Guitar overdrive. intentionally increasing the gain beyond max input level of the amplifier to produce a more square wave tone would’ve seemed sacrilege to guitarists from the 30’s and 40’s.
And today it’s the foundation of so many guitar sounds and music genres.
