SKF NOTE: This is one of my favorite Miles Davis insights. Especially his use of car crash sounds to explain how sounds change with the times and technology. Very, very insightful.

A lot of people ask me where music is going today. I think it’s going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that. Music is always changing. It changes because of the times and the technology that’s available, the material that things are made of, like plastic cars instead of steel. So when you hear an accident today it sounds different, not all the metal colliding like it was in the forties and fifties. Musicians pick up sounds and incorporate that into their playing, so the music that they make will be different.

Source: Miles Davis, Miles: The Autobiography, by Quincy Troupe, Simon & Schuster; (September 15, 1990)