Today, we wonder if music is real or artificial. The University
of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them. Sebastien Erard gave us a new
instrument in 1780. It was the advanced pianoforte -- the first
modern piano. As critics rose up against it, a bold young man
named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart put it to use. Yet critics still
complained that pianos were too dissonant and mechanical for
concert use, long after Mozart's Every new instrument has to
carve out a place in the public's ear. The clarinet fought its
battle just before the pianoforte. But now that sort of change
is reaching crisis proportions. We aren't just adding new
sounds. We're changing the rules of sound generation utterly. In
the late '30s, Benny Goodman reluctantly sat down to play with a
man using a regular guitar with a microphone in it. Goodman had
said those electrified guitars were a sacrilege. But after he
jammed through 16 choruses