POCKET PLAYBACK

摘要

For as long as people have wanted music, they've wanted it portable. For millennia, this was no problem. The human voice is effortlessly portable. Notched or drilled bamboo makes a reliable primitive flute. Two wooden blocks, as any toddler knows, work fine as a percussion instrument, and give any Neanderthal half a gourd and a bit of animal skin and you've got a proto-Ringo. But as time passed, the feast of music became less movable. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans used music lavishly in elaborate ceremonies, and we know a lot about their instruments. Many of these―horns, drums, cymbals―were portable, but as music grew bigger and more varied, so did the devices that produced it. Dragging a bellows-powered organ behind an advancing army was, to say the least, a logistics problem.