Description
Music is the most transient of the arts, vanishing the instant it is heard, yet lingering in the mind long after the final note fades. Over the past half-century, technology has extended that afterlife, giving each of us the tools to record, reconfigure and reimagine musical time.
DJs transformed vinyl into a creative instrument, repitching and remixing tracks in real time. Cassette tape brought recording into the home, letting listeners craft temporal journeys through mixtapes and pause-button edits that blurred the line between fan and creator. Sampling and digital tools made sound endlessly malleable, birthing new genres and pushing tempo and texture beyond human limits.
Today, streaming has collapsed past and present into a single archive, while algorithmic playlists and AI composition threaten to flood us with music that is at once disposable and permanently preserved.
Transients explores not just how technology transformed music, but how music transforms us – shaping memory, emotion, and attention. At its core, Transients reveals music’s profound paradox: fleeting yet timeless, ephemeral yet enduring. This thought-provoking account will change the way you listen – and how you think about time.
Quotes
“David Reid has super-sharp perceptions about the relationships between music, technology, time, and memory. He’s got a knack for using personal experience to pull the reader into a cleanly structured argument that’s both illuminating and entertaining. Transients is highly recommended to anyone interested in understanding how our perception of time has changed – and become increasingly uncanny – in the digital 21st Century” – Simon Reynolds, author of Energy Flash, Retromania and Still In A Dream:
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