Hunched over a typewriter, you'd call it painting in a cave
When a great musician saw the potential of vinyl long plays in distributing music cheaply and efficiently, he remarked something in the line of "I can't imagine all the crap that will be produced and sold under the name of music." Unfortunately, I cannot recall who made this remark. But history proved he was right. However, the technological improvements that started with LPs had an effect not only on the quality of the music. Even timeless compositions such as Mahler's Sixth or Stravinsky's Agon had to suffer. Trying to get rid of the musical Whiggist in me, I sometimes imagine myself listening to the compositions as someone who lived around the time they were first composed. This Gedankenexperiment showed me that LPs and mp3s stole from us something that I call the "wow efect." Imagine your favorite composition, or the song. Imagine you heard it for the first time, when a orchestra or the band came to your town, and you were struck by the composition