A Brief History Of Recorded Music
From Soot to Vinyl
1857 — The First Recording
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville makes the first sound recording. A membrane vibrating from a voice nearby moves a stylus, which scribbles the sound wave onto a scrolling sooty surface. He calls it phonautography.
But the device can’t play back. Scott will never be able to listen to his recording. Recently researchers were able to scan the original sooty graphical recording and had a computer play it back. It was Scott singing Au Clair De La Lune.
Interestingly, music recording will never quite free itself from having to borrow something from the visual realm. This is true of ancient notation in clay tablets, sheet music, phonograph players all the way to modern audio editing tools.
1877 — The First Playback
Thomas Edison improves the idea by having the stylus engrave the sound wave onto a rotating cylinder of tinfoil at first, then wax. Playback is possible by having the stylus run into the groove to vibrate an acoustic membrane.
You can now enjoy music on your own without needing live musicians. Music listening can become a personal, even solitary, experience.
This invention will change the nature of songs in the next century. Up until now songs were like storytelling frameworks to be rendered live for an audience. Each performance was unique and reflecting the times. Songs lived in the present; past interpretations long forgotten.
But from now on songs will perpetuate themselves in the human psyche as series of recordings over stretches of time, like fading snapshots in scrapbooks. Because recordings are inherently of the past, music becomes retrospective.
1912 — Phonograph Record
Wax cylinders are supplanted by flat records. Initially made from from shellac resin, records are soon manufactured from polyvinyl chloride. The plastic provides better sound quality and is more durable. Records can be stamped from a mold and produced in large numbers.
Records allow for longer play time, so a number of songs can be bundled together as a thematic unit. The music album is invented.
Record players are bought enthusiastically and proudly displayed in homes. Little do people know that these devices will become Trojan horses of new ideas, cultures and values.
This innovation is for music as seminal as the printing press for books. The mass market music industry is born, based similarly on the rights to make copies: copyrights.
This foundational business model makes sense as making copies is no easy task. But technology will progressively undermine this model in the latter part of the century.
1927 — The Jukebox
The jukebox as we know it makes its debut commercially. While simpler coin-operated devices existed before, the jukebox is the first to offer a choice of songs for patrons to choose from.
This is On-Demand Music in its original analog form. The jukeboxes contain an impressive catalog of songs. Patrons can even queue up songs for playing. Song plays are counted mechanically to track evolving music tastes. Some jukeboxes even have sponsored Playlists that you can select and listen to. This is the blueprint for all future music streaming services later in the century. Spotify will debut operations this way.
But music recording technology is still primitive. Songs are recorded by requiring all musicians to perform live in front of a microphone. This is about to change and artistic expression will soon expand into vast unchartered creative landscapes.
In Part 2 we’ll explore the magnetic revolution!
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About The Author
Pierre is a software engineer for a major computer maker based in Cupertino. He likes to speculate about innovations in various domains such as aviation, cloud computing, AI and next-generation music streaming.
All opinions and speculations presented here are strictly his own, and are unrelated to his day job and employer.
