I often wonder how people would react if you showed up to a concert hall in, say, classical music era Europe or something and performed modern music. Assuming you could kit it to provide infrastructure for whatever your performance required, and the acoustics of the venue were idealized.
Would attendees hate it? Would the unfamiliar musical styles be repulsive to them? Would the sounds and textures of modern instrumentation like electric guitar and synthesizer upset or even frighten them? Or would they find something to appreciate about it? Would the music be copied and spread, becoming a time worn classic folk tune in an alternate future? Or would it be rebuked and suppressed, condemned for all time as evil influence? Which genres would have the best acceptance chances in which cultures, and which eras?
In my mind in particular, I think about this with the niche realm of video game soundtracks. If not just the music played as-is through some playback device (which would probably be rather boring, but who knows, maybe the novelty of recorded music alone would be fascinating enough) then perhaps arranged for live performance, like the orchestral performance of Undertale, or the Sinnohvation big band album. Or, of course, if the soundtrack was itself a recorded live performance, just perform it. These collections of compositions often outline rich adventures, communicated by a wide range of musical styles. I wonder if they are strong enough to stand alone, and if audiences would respond to them without the context that they were written to accompany.
Failing live performance (which would be trickier than one would think–to sound good, live music has to be written with its venue in mind, and I’d assume most modern music would sound like garbage when performed in victorian era concert halls or ancient ampitheaters), I’d also consider putting them to vinyl LPs and dumping them in old record shops in any era that had phonograph or turntable technology and see if they get discovered.
Why not just send back the video games themselves? I dunno. I guess I’m less interested in wowing them with futuristic technology and more interested in how they’d react to something they already have (music), but in a strange, new context.
The temptation would be to play “Raining Blood” and get extremely excommunicated. “South of Heaven” you could argue is a musical Hieronymus Bosch painting. “Disciple,” less so. For apostasy that cheeky locals could reproduce on a lute, do “The God That Failed.”
Probably the least riot-inducing song that’d still leave the aristocracy struggling to deal with the experience is Anamanaguchi’s “Endless Fantasy.” To people intimately familiar with wind and string instruments, and for a song that Jackson Parodi managed to decently reproduce on a goddamn accordion, it’s juuust enough to leave everyone wondering how the hell humans made those noises. It’s also obscenely energetic. Nevermind concert halls, play this at cafe that’s just imported tobacco and watch some men in hosiery get off their asses. All of that goes double for “Prom Night.” None of these people have ever heard a square wave.
Somewhere in-between, I’d suggest any Flaming Lips album. At War With The Mystics might go over quite well, at first.
Phonographic recording would be incredible to introduce very early on. Basically as soon as the pottery wheel, you could have recorded and played back audio. They’d have to do some fractions-and-guesswork materials science to get anything properly reusable, let alone the ability to press new copies of a recording. But it would get done. Every ruler would want their voice carried to all corners of the territory. Musicians would be known to people who’d never see them in-person. We’d have so much more evidence of how languages were spoken.
But specifically - in the spirit of the question - I’d do this by taking back a crank-operated player and a whole stack of bagpipe albums. Just completely fuck up what ancient peoples think music is supposed to be. Accordions would also work, but I’m not sure I could construct one for demonstration purposes. I could build a hurdy-gurdy, at best. And nobody has a shelf full of vinyl for insufferable droning hurdy-gurdy music.
Here’s a darkly hilarious one, because you could do it by accident: give smallpox to the native Americans a few hundred years early. Right around 1000 AD, show up to shake hands and teach metallurgy or whatever, maybe planning to jump-start their resistance to colonization… and their resistance to slaughterhouse-borne diseases, the hard way.
This would of course completely fuck up their population numbers, much the same as would happen in Europe in the 1300s. But by the time Columbus showed up to be the absolute worst person who could possibly discover a new continent, they’d be largely recovered, and they’d get to trade whole new strains with the seasick lemon-sucking weirdos who kept asking where the spices were. The returning ships would offer tomatoes and potatoes and another Black Death. Hopefully preventing Malthus from being such an influential bastard, and causing the first engineered famine in Ireland, whose population did not recover from the potato famine until this century.
New England colonies would presumably still take hold, but wouldn’t steamroll all the way to the west coast. Hopefully they’d be limited and northern enough that slavery is less prevalent, less absolute, and - ironically - still a matter of trade. Because what ended the triangle trade to America was the treatment of African captives as livestock to be bred. The politics of this alternate timeline would be hilariously complex compared to now, and probably result in more and stranger wars than we can imagine, but there would be so many averted times where atrocities happened, effectively unopposed.
Bring the secrets of caravel making to the Phoenicians/Carthaginians some 50 years before the first Punic wars. Maybe also some scribbles of the coast of Africa and the best winds to reach America.
I’d prevent the Challenger launch. Manned spaceflight doesn’t get shelved for an entire generation, and a young me doesn’t lose hope for the future at such an early age.
Through a bizarre series of butterfly effects, the successful launch and its international attention gives bureaucrats in Pripyat an extra nudge to encourage cooperation amongst their engineers and nuclear scientists, and a critical flaw in the operation of the plant at Chernobyl is caught before it causes a catastrophic meltdown.
The cumulative effect is a continued culture of progressive technological expansion into the 90s, and the fading of the anti-intellectualism that threatened to overtake the world during the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Hand in hand with this is a decreased militarism, as technology is increasingly seen as a tool for the betterment of humanity, and less as a means of building better weapons.
One other immediate result is in the US presidential election of 1988. A lack of meaningful engagement with the public (no “skipped the surly bonds of earth” speech) led to increasing apathy toward the outgoing Reagan administration, giving G.H.W. Bush a tougher hill to climb, and less solid footing on the issue of defense. Dukakis doesn’t feel the need to do a silly photo op in a tank, but instead campaigns partly on an expansion of the space program and educational outreach programs similar to the one that brought in Christa McAuliffe.
Neoconservatism and neoliberalism wither together on the vine. Permanent human presence in space continues uninterrupted for the next two decades, with a base on the moon by the end of the century and a manned mission to Mars planned for a decade after that.
No Bushes, no rise of Al-Qaeda in 1988, no Gulf War, no Rush Limbaugh, no Clinton’s, and no 9/11.
Administrators considering stopping entire space program.
“It must be some kind of message”, said Jerry Jenkins, head of NASA’s department of deciding whether to continue with space exploration whatsoever. “The time traveler knows something we don’t, and if he’s back here stopping launches it must mean there’s bad outcomes from space stuff.”
Not per se necessary to prevent it - either listen to the on-site rep from MT, who raised concerns in OTL that were disregarded, or make that day warmer. All other things being equal, without the crisis, we would have learned a great deal - but not at the cost of several lives.
It haunts me to this day that an improved version of STS would likely still be an option for launches, if only McDonald had been listened to.
I can fault the company, but he made a good faith effort to stop it because testing hadn’t been done at the current temperatures, AIUI.
On the ohter hand, those lives vs [GHWB | Dukakis | anyone else] directly impacts OTL - Arguably, we’d never have a Trump presidency, but Duke is simply a gentler, faster version of the same.
Not sure we wouldn’t still get Bushes, or Gulf War, but certainly what we ended up with would be more tempered, and there’s a real benefit to that. All these years on, perhaps we’d still have the ‘old school’ Republican party instead of the “I’m not a fascist, I swear!” Republican party.
Something that would do that neoliberism in the 80’s with Reagan and Thatcher would not become the dominating political and economic theory it has been since that time.
By doing that you would leave behind so many new and much more complex cells (modern bacteria, yeas, maybe even spores) You would probably boost evolution by millions of years!
Introduce radio to the Romans. They had the metallurgy to create coils. Even a simple Morse code system would easily keep their empire going. Probably end up like that Star Trek TOS where Centurions are carrying sub-machine guns, though. If want to read what a great SF writer did with this (guy from 1938 ends up in 535AD), read “Lest Darkness Fall”
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