hi-fi+ Global Network Magazine hi-fi+ Issue 249 Back Issue

As we move toward our combination 250th and Awards issue, it occurs to me that audio has a function rarely spoken about. It’s a time machine. And often, the better the system, the greater the time machine effect.

The time machine component is an odd one. Music, perhaps more than anything, can cast you back to the time and place you first heard that recording. It can invoke memories of the place you bought the recording, who was with you when you bought it, the time, the place and the people with you when you first heard it and more. That focus on memory can work wonders; we’ve probably all seen the video footage of those with advanced dementia briefly coming out of their shell just by listening to the music of their youth. Taste and smell have similar ‘wayback’ elements, but they are less focused on a particular time, and invoke more general memories of a person or vague age rather than the specifics of a musical event.

The time machine effect has a deeper component than just reminding you of things you did in the past. It can summon up past events you weren’t a party to. Very few people today were alive when Louis Armstrong was cutting ‘West End Blues’ back in 1928, and absolutely no-one is old enough to have been at the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth or Mozart’s The Magic Flute. But listening to recordings can place us in that concert hall. That makes audio more than a time machine; it’s a TARDIS!

Yes, a good movie or stage play can do that; you are in that misty Casablanca airport, watching Frau Blücher frighten the horses, or even fighting AT-ATs on the Ice Planet of Hoth. But music can do it instantaneously. In a single musical bar, your memories and those seemingly allied to the music take over.