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This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Gertrace said that architecture is frozen music. That's lovely.

Of course that was before audio recording, so now for the most part, music is frozen music.

It's only very recently in the history of music that we've been able to freeze music into an object.

And in my life, the form of this object mattered a lot.

I once bought vinyl albums and cassette tapes, and there were two first songs per album, Side A and Side B.

The energy of a first song made it stand apart from the other songs, at least in my head it did.

Then the CD came along, an eliminated Side B, and there was only one first song.

And the actual number of the track that you can see prominently displayed on the CD player UI.

That became my index-presorting songs.

Then MP3s jumbled my sense of track order, and albums began to feel more like a loose group being of individual pieces rather than a conceptual hole.

I could do this all day, and you're welcome to chime in. Let's just let's totally hash this out on the website.

But my point is this, when it comes to music, the form of the thing matters.

But no effect has been as world-changing as the original innovation, freezing music in time onto a recording,

where a single version of a song, a single performance of a song, became the song.

This inherently mutable method of communication was fundamentally changed.

Songs are astonishing things, and I also don't think most people really even know what they are.

That's the songwriter composer, Ampera's or John Bryant.

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