Beer and Debussy

My email client picks random signatures for the end of my email messages. I’ve got about 300 different quotes - ranging from stupid to silly to sublime. Over the years, I think my various email programs (Claris Emailer, then Apple Mail) have become sentient, and are reading my outgoing messages, picking appropriate quotes.  I was writing a message to a colleague about a streaming audio project we’re working on, and my mail program randomly picked a quote for the end of the message. It was this: 

> “At a time like ours, in which mechanical skill has attained

> unsuspected perfection, the most famous works may be heard as easily

> as one may drink a glass of beer, and it only costs ten centimes, > like

> the automatic weighing machines. Should we not fear this > domestication

> of sound, this magic that anyone can bring from a disc at will? Will

> it not bring to waste the mysterious force of an art which one might

> have thought indestructible?” – Claude Debussy

Debussy, in the late 1800s, was amazed (and a bit scared) by the fundamental shift in listening to music - something we’re all taking completely for granted now. It must have been an incredible thing to hear music when no one was actually playing it at the time.

Today, I’ve got more than 6 months worth of music in iTunes, several hundred songs in my pocket, and I can listen to even more stuff through the Internet. All of this domesticated sound can be heard as easily as I might drink a glass of beer, and it only costs ten centimes. What have we lost?