Read an extract from Mad Skills

Next week we’ll be publishing Ryan Alexander Diduck’s Mad Skills: MIDI and Music Technology in the Twentieth Century, a cultural history of MIDI and it’s impact on the ways music is made and consumed.

From today you can read an extract from the fourth chapter, “Synthesizer, Sampler, Mixmaster, Spy”, in The Wire.

In the beginning, there was the word. The word was a voice. The voice had a speaker. And the speaker knew the magic words. Fast-forward thousands of years to a time when humans behave like robots and robots behave like humans. Nobody knows the magic words anymore. Computers don’t distinguish between messages of love or hatred. Microchips make music and war with indifferent equivalence. All word, every voice, is now code. It has been for years.

You can read the rest of the extract here.