Revolutions don't just happen. The popular view of the invention of the wheel changing the world overnight is completely wrong, since there was a gradual evolution from rollers to wheels on axles, and certainly no sudden appearance of a fully developed wheel! Despite appearances, the technology involved in hi-tech music works in exactly the same way. For example, the roots of the sampler can be traced back through many preceding devices: drum machines, echo units, tape recorders etc.

Technology makes small advances in many directions, and it is this continuous development which allows 'new' applications to become possible — the sampler is possible in its current form because digital memory chips are cheap and easily available. The Mellotron of 20 years ago can be thought of as a 'sample playback device' built using tape recorder technology. The Yamaha DX7's FM synthesis may have been completely different to the analogue synthesizers which preceded it, but the mathematical basis of FM had been known for many years, and it was only the availability of low-cost custom digital chips which made it possible to produce the DX7 at an affordable price.

Tracing back today's equipment to see how it has brought together techniques and technologies can help to reveal some of the potential advances which might otherwise appear unexpectedly! The sampler is a good example of how falling prices of RAM memory chips have enabled rapid increases in the length and quality of samples. The current trend to add hard disks to samplers for extra on-board storage echoes the wider use of hard disks in the computer industry. The next stage of development seems to be to add magneto-optical (MO) disks, and although on the surface this may just seem to be a way of offering even longer storage times, the underlying trend is more interesting.

MO disks offer huge storage at comparatively low cost, and as with most current technology, the price is related to the quantity of units that are produced — initially the cost is high, but once the mass market is activated then the price can fall dramatically. MO disks use some of the ideas in CDs technology, but add the facility to re-record as well. Increasing the sample time on a sampler does not dramatically affect its applications until you reach a length of about an hour, at which point the sampler has become something much more like a tape recorder. But cassette recorders are already in widespread use, so is the MO-based sampler nothing more than a re-invented tape recorder?

The difference is that whereas a tape recorder stores the information in analogue form, an MO-based sample recorder/player uses digital recording. Also, the disk format of MO disks means that the time to access a specific sample is much shorter than that required by shuttling through hundreds of metres of tape. Remember that this is not just another digital recorder like DAT or DCC; the basic access time limitation of tape and its serial format (track 1, then track 2, and so on) has been removed, so you can play any part of the disk followed by any other part.

In case you thought that that was of little significance, consider the effect of the video recorder on TV viewing. Have you ever tried to fast-forward through the adverts or a boring bit on a 'live' programme? Some people already record everything and then skim through it later, and interactive TV promises this sort of facility for everyone! What about cassettes? Do you listen to specific tracks on a cassette, or do you play the whole thing? How often do you program your CD player to miss out the tracks you don't like on a CD, or do you just play the whole thing in the order that the artist intended?

Because of the way that tape technology (and to some extent CD technology) has been packaged, recorded music seems to be perceived as a series of events which happen in a fixed order. Consider an alternative: this magazine. Although it is possible to start at the beginning and move through from page 1 to the last page, it is also just as possible to skim quickly through the pages, or even to turn to an interesting article and read that and that alone, ignoring the rest of the magazine entirely. So why can't music be like that? With our sampler-turned-recorder/player, it can!

Applying this non-serial music concept to our sampler-turned-recorder/player, we have the situation where selecting the hit single from an album does not guarantee the playing of the rest of the album tracks, nor does it mean that the whole of that one track needs to be played. If you like just the chorus, then you can have just that, and you can jump from that to another section you like. The sampler-turned-recorder/player offers the potential to make the assembly of brief portions of music from many sources an everyday event, instead of the time-consuming process it is at the moment. Worse, this power would be in the hands of the final consumer, not the creators of the music, nor in the hands of skilled DJs.

There are all sorts of consequences to this. If anyone can put drum loops together for free, why bother buying someone else's attempts at the same? Songs added to albums merely to fill out the space might never be heard, and so why bother including anything except the potential hit singles? Could the MO equivalent of sample CDs become best sellers because they offer excellent scope for making your own music? Having whetted the appetite of the music buying public to the wonders of sampling, it should be interesting to see what happens if the roles are reversed! Does popular music have to be a fixed sequence of songs? Would people prefer to put their own music together from pre-recorded sections? What happens to the charts? The whole way that recorded music is perceived may be about to change.