Watch Soundbreaking Season 1 Episode 8 Online

Soundbreaking's final episode, I Am My Music, shifts the focus away from the creation of music to the experience of listening to it, and to the formats that have shaped and ultimately defined that experience. From vinyl discs to the cassette tape, the CD, and the MP3, each generation has had a piece of musical media to call its own--a way of listening that determines not only how and where we listen, but also the manner in which we collect, store, and share the music we love. What was once an almost tactile experience--a matter of cover art and liner notes and record collections that encapsulated our identity and even telegraphed it to visitors--has now become a blizzard of 0s and 1s, a kind of listening that is at once more intangible, more private, and arguably, by virtue of our nearly limitless access to history's entire catalogue of recorded music, also far more varied than ever before. What remains unchanged is the fundamental miracle of recorded music for the listener: it is ...