The BBC's new series about music, Sound Of Song (BBC Four, Friday, 9pm), includes some middle-aged musicians complaining about MP3 players and arguing that vinyl is better.

It is classic grumpy man behaviour. When television was invented, there were those who said they preferred listening to the radio. When electric light was discovered, there were those who said they preferred candlelight. When the wheel was invented, there were those who said they preferred to walk.

The problem with MP3 players, according to these men, is that they remove about 90% of recorded sound and leave a piece of music with all the notes in the right places but none of the kinks and grooves that make music exciting. It is a skeleton without the flesh.

It's quite a convincing argument, except for two things: an MP3 player is more convenient on the train than a gramophone or a 100-piece orchestra (where would they all sit?) and music technology has always attracted this kind of response anyway. When Thomas Edison made the first ever recording, Debussy began moaning. "Should we fear this domestication of sound?" he said, "this magic preserved on a disc that one can awaken at will?"

The presenter of Sound Of Song, Neil Brand, doesn't take sides, but he does explore each argument by looking deep into how songs work. He is like a mechanic who lifts the bonnet of a car and shows us how the carburettor works, except that he lifts the lid of a piano and tells us how songs work and, in particular, how technology has changed songs and singers.

Take the crooner, for example. In the early days, when songs were recorded onto wax cylinders, the performer could not sing too softly because their voice would not be picked up. But when the microphone was invented, that changed: rather than shouting into a horn, singers could whisper into a microphone and a new crooning style of singing was possible. In other words, Edward Wente invented the microphone and the microphone invented Bing Crosby.

Brand points out that technology has always influenced singing and, in the third episode, there's a wonderful section in which he deconstructs the Cher song Believe. It's a weird track in many ways, but it was invented by technology because the particular sound of Cher's voice would not have been possible without what was then, in the late 1990s, a brand new invention: the autotune.

The autotune has since become controversial, with some people suggesting that by altering pitch, it can make bad singers good, but Brand is rather a fan of it, particularly when it is used experimentally as it was with Believe. Technology in music is not a bad thing, he argues, it's just a natural progression in the joy and wonder of listening to your favourite sound. And if the technology is troublesome, it doesn't matter anyway because something different will come along. Even the MP3 player will be superseded in time. One day, it will look as clunky as the wax cylinder.