Burns began recording the album once he got a computer that record and edit sounds.

No matter which school you belonged to, assembling a composition could take months while you set up equipment, edited tapes and layered sounds in what was a primitive form of multitracking.

Hearing Voices features very little instrumentation, eerie soundscapes, and mostly voices and edited sounds throughout the whole CD.

Recorded music has now become a separate expressive form, thanks to a range of studio technologies deriving fundamentally from the ability to edit and amalgamate sounds, made possible by the use of magnetic tape.

Inside each scene, users can drill down further to edit the individual textures, backgrounds and sounds.

Tape had to be physically cut and pasted together to edit finished sounds and compositions.

Sound Designer was originally designed to edit sounds for the E-MU Emulator sampling keyboard.

In addition, he mentions how the rap genre in particular is full of music that's extremely difficult to perform live because of the heavily edited sounds and loops.

The ability to quickly edit sounds whilst performing live is made possible as a result of the new "variation" controls in which the user can map up to 7 control parameters per program.

However, due to the limited accuracy of the sliders, and because edited parameters jump from the value in memory to the value corresponding to the position of the slider, when the slider is moved, it is hard to edit sounds while playing, without creating sudden "jumps" in the sound.