Thursday 13 October 2016

Hardware and Software Essay

The proliferation of hardware and software in the music industry has led to improvements in production practices.

I agree with this statement for the most part. The proliferation of hardware and software in the music industry has led to improvements in production in practices in many ways. The fact that people can now produce music on laptops at home makes producing music so much faster and easier. Instead of making a point of going out to a studio, people can sit at home and produce music easily, meaning that people can do it in their spare time or as hobby. Due to rapidly advancing technologies, producing music is now quicker and easier than ever before. Like everything else in the world, the proliferation of software and hardware has had both positive and negative effects on the production practices. Whilst one could say that there are mostly positives for this argument, I will demonstrate both sides in my essay.

For starters, perhaps the most obvious factor, hardware and software have made music production easier and faster. These days, people can sit at home in their living room or maybe even their very own make-shift studio, and create a whole new track from scratch. People can sit all day and work on a song from the comfort of their own home, rather than having the trouble of going to a studio and worrying about how much time and money it's costing them. This makes the overall experience faster, cheaper, and worry free. The very fact that we can now sit at home and create a brand new song due to the proliferation of hardware and software, makes the whole overall experience much easier, accessible and universal. It means that for people living in the country in the middle of no where, they no longer have to travel to the closest big town to locate a studio. It means for the people with very busy, hectic lives, who only have an hour to spare here and there, can actually sit at home and do exactly what they love without worrying about whether or not it will fit into their schedule. It means people can whip out their laptop on the train and edit a bit more of their new song on their daily commute to work. The proliferation hardware and software in the music industry has made all of this possible, and I feel like that is remarkable.

The increase of options and technological advancements may not always be a good thing however.
Sander Klienenberg, electronic producer and performer says "Technological advancements have opened doors but it has also made it difficult for producers because there are so many options thrown at you" These days there are so many options and paths to go down its almost overwhelming and in more ways that one, simply confusing. All these new advancements in technologies have complicated the industry and made it hard for producers to decide what path to go down.

The internet has been a huge contributing factor to the advancements of hardware's and software's as the internet is the birth place for all the latest gadgets. The internet is used my billions of people worldwide every day and the more people that use the internet to discover new music production technologies, the more this industry will grow. The creation of programmes such as MIDI has led to a further increase in this particular industry. MIDI, which stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, is a protocol designed for recording and playing back music on digital synthesizers that is supported by many makes of personal computer sound cards. It was originally intended to control one keyboard from another, it was quickly adopted for the personal computer. Rather than representing musical sound directly, it transmits information about how music is produced. The command set includes note-ons, note-offs, key velocity, pitch bend and other methods of controlling a synthesizer. The sound waves produced are those already stored in a wavelength in the receiving instrument or sound card.

In conclusion, the proliferation of hardware and software has had both negative and positive effects on the music industry. Whilst the proliferation of music software and hardware has also led to the ability to improve the quality of production, there has also been some bad consequences of the advancement of technologies, which I have highlighted many above.

1 comment:

  1. Very good in terms of argument and terminology Erin, but much more needed in terms of case study materials to illustrate your points
    argument-16
    examples-11
    terminology-7
    34/50

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