Tramaine Hawkins’ 1994 interpretation of I Found the Answer employs Mahalia Jackson’s 1950s performance as a compositional framework, altering the tune that each voice appears in various portions of the song. The ability to preserve musical acts through recording fundamentally changed the social and aesthetic implications of music. A half-century later, the cassette recorder was invented, making sonorities not only repeatable but changeable as well. The techniques developed as a result allowed recorded sounds to be fractured, merged, and manipulated. Such changes might have an impact on sound quality and time spans. This work was written with the aim of studying and comparing two records from different eras.
Recording technology has forced people to rethink what constitutes a piece of music. It is illogical to assert that a written score conveys musical vibrations. Estimation usually does not provide guidance on how the engineer should manipulate their variables. Two tapes of the exact rendition that have been mixed, adjusted, and reverberated separately can vary just as much as two distinct versions of the same composition. This confirms the fact that these records range from each other. These differences lie both in the arrangement itself and in the voice and methods of mixing voice and music.
The technologies of the eras set distinct musical trends both in genres and in listening to music; that is why the recordings sound dissimilar. The old recording is more compressed and noisier because cassettes were used for recording, which created a characteristic noise. The new recording is cleaner and more profound due to more modern voice processing. Speaking about the effects used in the recording, people can see how the echo or reverb effect differs between the versions of the songs. This indicates that different technologies were used to create the effect. Previously, all effects were created through cassette manipulation, but in recent years it has all moved into the digital space.
The use of electronics in music enables more efficient training of basic music concepts through practice and different situations that develop a firm grasp of rhythm and note identification. Technology makes it easy to produce presentations and lectures that may be distributed to help with the education in any style of music (Eiksund et al., 2020). While innovation swiftly improves education, it enhances learning. This indicates that music technology allows people to make all aspects related to music at the highest level. Technology itself is an excellent way to remake this record as it gives the record a new flavor in the form of a more modern sound that can attract new listeners.
To summarize, the capacity to record musical acts has profoundly altered the sociological and cultural significance of music. The advancement of recording technology has compelled individuals to reconsider what constitutes a piece of music. Older recordings were more compressed and noisier since tapes were utilized for recording, which resulted in a unique noise recording. The new recording is crisper and more meaningful as a result of more recent speech processing. This means that music technology enables individuals to generate as many components of music as possible. Technology is an excellent technique to play this record since it provides the song a new edge in the form of a more modern sound that may assist pull in customers.
Reference
Eiksund, Ø. J., Angelo, E., & Knigge, J. (2020). Music Technology in Education: Channeling and Challenging Perspectives. Cappelen Damm Akademisk/NOASP (Nordic Open Access Scholarly Publishing).