Music is the most transient of the arts: gone the moment the note fades, yet echoing in memory long after. For fifty years, technology has extended that afterlife - handing listeners the tools to record, reshape, and relive musical time. DJs turned vinyl into an instrument of the present tense. Cassette tape let a generation edit their own emotional timelines onto ninety minutes of magnetic ribbon. Sampling and digital tools set sound loose from the limits of the human body, birthing entire genres in the process. And now streaming has folded past and present into a single, infinite archive - while algorithms and AI threaten to bury us in music built to be forgotten the moment it's made. Drawing on three decades in the music industry, author David Reid weaves personal narrative with psychology, neuroscience, and technological insight. Transients is about more than how technology reshaped music. It's about how music reshapes us: our memory, our emotion, our sense of time itself. Fleeting yet timeless. Disposable yet indelible. This is a book that will change the way you listen - and the way you think about time.
