The technology we use to make and especially to listen to music has been constantly evolving ever since human beings started engaging with music. Putting together larger groups of musicians and singers and making acoustic instruments louder certainly helped to increase the potential numbers of listeners to live music, but major changes took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries thanks to fast-paced technological change. In the nineteenth century it became possible to record a musical performance and replay it again and again, and in the twentieth century, electronic technology enabled both virtually unlimited private listening via portable devices as well as amplification efficient enough to enable many tens of thousands of people to listen to music together.
Listening to music together is not a new phenomenon, but the way the technology of the twentieth century has enabled people to engage with both live and recorded music in a wide and varied number of ways provides a fascinating subject for study.
This video is centred on an interview with Clive Spring in which he recounts his own personal listening experiences from childhood in the Caribbean to adulthood in the United Kingdom, mainly focused on sound systems including Soprano B, Quaker City, and Jah Shaka. The richness of detail in Clive's account includes reflections on the technology, some of the social factors around sound systems, the physical sensations of listening to loud bass sounds, spiritual and cultural elements, ideas about the value of music, and more.
Clive demonstrates just some of the ways in which music can have an impact both on the individual and also within society in general. Thinking about music in these terms is a typical feature of the study of popular music, but also applies to music from any place and time. These ideas suggest several avenues that can be explored through further study not only of music related to sound systems, but of any type of music at all, as demonstrated in all our Open University undergraduate and postgraduate music courses.
Find out more about The Open University's Music courses and qualifications.
Acknowledgement: With thanks to MK Arena for allowing us to use the stadium during the film production.
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