Brian Eno on Technology in Music

I just watched that Showtime documentary on the making of U2‘s under-appreciated masterpiece album Achtung Baby (I think it was called From the Sky Down).  If you missed it, go find it, trust me.

Anyway, one of the things I was blown away by was the role that technology took in shaping the recordings into something that was both rock music but also something much more.  The credit for that process goes to Brian Eno and his then studio mate Daniel Lanois.  Eno opened an exhibit on technology and music at a museum in the UK recently, here are his thoughts on the topic which I found to be fascinating…

People often ask me what role technology plays in music, and whether I think there is too much technology in music. Recently, I have started answering by saying that technology in music is a little bit like numbers to mathematics. You can’t really imagine music without technology. Now, as my friend Danny Hillis the inventor said, technology is the name we give to things that don’t work yet. When it works we don’t call it technology anymore. But you have to remember that once upon a time a violin was technology, once upon a time an organ was technology. Those things were all built and created by people who were working at the cutting edge of the technologies of their time.

Read the rest:

Brian Eno on bizarre instruments (Telegraph)

hat tip Paul