Independent Research Entry

When asked to choose a technical innovation that has impacted the music industry, I immediately think of the DAW or digital audio workstation. The creation of the DAW is in my opinion the most influential event on popular music today. Nearly every form of vocal editing is only possible because the DAW allows a space for the pitch correction software to live. Additionally, the addition of elastic audio to pro tools 7.4 allows for a fool proof method to pocket theses vocals. I think the production of vocals themselves essentially sways the music industry more than any other kind of production. I feel as if most listeners hear two different things when they listen to a song: the music and the vocals. The music is lumped up into one large category and the vocals are responsible for about 50% of that persons interpretation of the song. The DAW makes vocal editing very easy by displaying a very nice graphical readout of the waveform so that you can dissect a sentence word by word.  Almost all audio that is being edited in today’s music industry is passed through a DAW for processing or tuning. The DAW is also good because there are many useful music production plug ins in today’s market that will run on the host DAW. For example it is very simple to change between different compressors while mixing because all you need to do is click a drop down menu, no patching. On the other side of music production is the music itself which a DAW takes to the next level. A graphical display of sounds on top of each other in a window makes time editing very simple. Another very good feature in a few DAW’s like pro tools and logic is the score edit functions. It is possible to write a song using entirely midi on logic, print the score for the separate parts, and have studio musicians play the parts you wrote on your midi controller. This allows for people who do not read or write music to be more creative and still make recordable music. Some would argue that midi is a conversation in itself about the impact it had on popular music but without the DAW midi would not be as powerful as it is today. As an industry professional it bothers me slightly that music production has become more about learning software than actually making music, but my opinion is not going to slow down the hundreds and thousands of hungry producers using midi to write songs, so I must adapt.