I suppose I first heard music live -- voices chanting, sticks drumming on hollow logs, mouths blowing across gourds and bone flutes. Oh, the wild dances and bloody sacrifices! Sometimes we'd get so worked up we'd go massacre the tribe next door.

Ok, I'm not that old. Most of the music I heard in my childhood was on 33 rpm and 45 rpm vinyl disks. Most were made of black plastic, with the rare translucent red or blue. Some of those in my Dad's bookshelf were a heavier, hard black rubber compound. Almost all records had nicks and scratches, sometimes bad enough to jump the needle back so you'd hear the same 1.8 second clip over and over.

Some kids had transistor radios, some almost as small as a pack of cigarettes. They threw the word "transistor" in there to distinguish these radios from those with vacuum tubes, which were bigger than a toaster and almost as hot.

When I was in my teens, we had a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and we had a couple of dozen commercially recorded tapes. Great sound, but the tape would fatigue, sometimes imprinting an echo sound onto the layers on either side, and sometimes even breaking.

At that point, our car had an eight-track cassette tape player. Amazing how much they could squeeze onto a 1/4 inch tape, but clunky and prone to alignment issues.

Does anyone else remember the introduction of the Sony Walkman? Cassette tapes, then CDs, and now iPods and MP3 players. Next, they'll beam music directly into your head. You might hear voices now and then, and you really won't be able to tell whether it's the music or the government or God telling you to go massacre your neighbors.