After starting work on my third book in January 2023, I’ve been making steady progress. With initial drafts of the first five chapters now done and dusted (out of a planned total of eight), I’m currently more than halfway through and anticipating completion towards the end of 2025. As reported in my previous post, the subject of the book is the history of music technology. However, it won’t cover the development of acoustic musical instruments as there are many excellent books available on that subject already. Instead, it will concentrate on the application of mechanical, electrical and electronic technology to music.
You can get an impression of the scope of the book from the chapter headings:-
- The Mechanical Age
- Understanding Sound
- Sound Recording and Reproduction
- Electromechanical and Electromagnetic Instruments
- The Electrification of the Guitar
- Analogue Electronic Instruments
- The Advent of the Electronic Synthesiser
- The Digital Revolution
Although the writing hasn’t gotten any easier third time around, I’ve found that conducting the research for this latest book has been eased slightly due to an increase in the amount of source material available online. When writing my first book, The Story of the Computer: A Technical and Business History, which I started working on in 2003, I relied heavily on the physical collections of the University of Glasgow library for my research, as much of the source material required was not available online at that time. With my second book, The Story of the Robot: A Short History of Automation and Robotics, which I started working on in 2017, the situation had improved considerably but I still had to seek out physical copies of some of the source material. This time around I’ve been able to find almost everything I need online which has saved me a huge amount of time in carrying out my research.
One of the most useful online resources has been the Internet Archive, a web archive and digital library founded by the American internet entrepreneur Brewster Kahle. It’s absolutely huge and well worth checking out if you are carrying out any research of your own.
The Story of the Computer 