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Originally Posted by black max
I'll vote for computers/programming, not because I think it's a definitive "right" answer, but because it's worth mentioning. Yea zillions of people have been able to make music without learning complex instrumentation through the medium of computers; professional musicians have been able to play with different sounds and instruments that they don't know how to play per se through electronics.
Not that this is always a good thing by any means, but then, nothing is.
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I have to agree with black max, I almost voted for electrification, but when I started thinking about it, it seemed that computers/software (C/S from here on) really has made the most change in music in the 20th (and now 21st) century. I'm including ICs, analog signal processing, DSP, sampling, waveform editing, MIDI, synthesis, looping, instrument/amp/room simulation etc. all under C/S. Electrification allowed people to be heard by bigger audiences, and amplification allowed for some interesting tonal changes like distortion, but the instruments still sounded pretty similar and you still needed somebody to play the parts. It's arguable whether one should include old analog circuits under C/S but I do since after all the very first computers were analog and modern signal processing almost always has some software running somewhere, so I'm seperating simple amplification from the rest and calling that electrification since for many years that was pretty much all there was.
C/S has allowed the creation of music/sounds that simply couldn't be produced previously. In addition C/S allows one to write music that may be unplayable by humans (some of FZ's polyrhythmic music borders on this). C/S has also allowed composers to hear music they wrote without having to hire people to play it. I'm not saying that not hiring musicians is a good thing, but it does let one work things out on one's own before spending a lot of money to pay people to play it, especially in the case of orchestral music (FZ is again a good example of this and it is likely why he started using the synclavier so much). Also as black max mentioned it allows people who can't even play an instrument to make music, sometimes even with interesting results. And then there is all the recording/mixing/mastering stuff that can be done, well you get the idea...