LECTURE WEEK 3 MMST 12016

The Recording in Popular Culture: A Short History of Audio Technology

By Jim Douglas

Objectives

By the end of the lecture, you should be able to identify some of the key moments and developments in the history of audio recording technologies. The aim of this lecture is to examine the importance of sound to a culture while explaining some key terms/issues, including: the gramophone and phonograph, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, recording media, the domestification of recording technologies, and magnetic tape.

Readings

Dave Laing 1991 “A Voice Without a Face: Popular Music and the Phonograph in the 1890s”, Popular Music, 10/1: 1-9 [This reading not available online]

Jason Toynbee 2000 “Technology: the Instrumental Instrument” in his Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions, London: Arnold, pp 68-101 Click here to access a .pdf of the reading. Acrobat reader required.

Introduction

When we start to think about the history of ‘recording’, perhaps the first thing to enter our heads is the history of recorded music. The proliferation and sheer ubiquitous nature of compact discs (CDs) and before them vinyl records and cassette tapes containing music recordings makes it easy to forget not only that the invention of recording technologies was originally not concerned with music at all but that the actual history of recorded music is, in human terms, a relatively recent one.

In order to communicate in some way with one another, humans have long tried to record the events and goings-on of their day-to-day lives. Until the invention of forms of writing, the only visible means of doing this was through painting. Today we can still see the results of this earliest medium of human communication in cave or rock paintings. It wasn’t until the industrialised nineteenth century that technology was invented that allowed both greater mobility in recording human endeavours, and the ability to copy or reproduce such efforts on a grand scale. Ease of capturing and reproducing the visual was catered for through the invention of photography in the early part of the century. It wasn’t until the latter part of the nineteenth century that sound, first of all in the form of human speech, could be captured. 

The significance of sound to a culture is perhaps summed up in the following words: “The noises of a society are in advance of its images and material conflicts”. (Attali 11) Despite claims that ours is a visual culture, taken literally, Attali’s words resonate with a kind of common sense. Nonetheless, it is not the role of this lecture to try and argue for the supposed pre-eminence of sound over vision (or indeed the reverse of that statement). Rather, the purpose of this week’s lecture is to explore some of the historical moments in the development of audio-technologies, with a particular focus on music recording technologies. Of course, in the space we have here it is not possible to cover the entire spectrum of this very detailed and interesting history. Therefore the approach I will take is to discuss some of the key inventions and their collective cultural impact, including how the gramophone has moved from being thought of as a recording tool, to a playback device, to being an instrument. The main early developments in audio technology took place initially in the United States of America (USA). However, while developments in the USA are the focus of this lecture, it should be acknowledged that developments in Europe and the United Kingdom (UK) also had a significant impact in the development of audio recording technologies.

Sound Recording: Early Days and Early Ways

When thinking in terms of the historical development of technology, it is easy to think that this thing led to this, which led to this and then this, and so on. While it may be easier to think in such terms, the reality can be somewhat different. Quite often attempts to invent one-thing results in a multitude of spin-offs, often accidental, that vary entirely from the original tack taken by the inventor. The phonograph, inspired by attempts to better perfect telephone technology, is an example of such an ‘accident’ of invention and will be the focus of this lecture. Like many inventions, the phonograph underwent various name as well as developmental changes. However, broadly speaking, the term ‘phonograph’ has come to be more commonly associated with the twentieth century ‘record player’ or turntable.

(Aside: The phonograph was the name patented by Thomas A. Edison for a device that could record on and play back wax-coated cylinders. The ‘gramophone’ was a device invented by Emil Berliner for the playing back of recorded, flat disks. In the beginning it was easy to distinguish between both machines. In an interesting twist, in the United States in particular, the term phonograph became the general term for referring to a device that could play recorded music on records, long after the demise of cylinders. In Britain meanwhile, people were still referring to ‘gramophone’ records in the 1950s although both terms are more or less universally interchangeable. It is possible that the terminology has continued to be used in such a way in contemporary Britain. Australia has usually followed Britain in this line. For the purposes of this essay, I will mention both terms separately in relation to their specific nineteenth century usage but will use both terms interchangeably when mentioning the development of records in the twentieth century).

One of the key names to discuss in terms of the invention of the phonograph and the later gramophone (and indeed, many other inventions as well) is Thomas A. Edison. Edison, together with the people who worked for him and on his behalf, was one of the most prolific inventors towards the end of the nineteenth century. Edison introduced the world to what he called the phonograph in 1877. For the first time, sound could be recorded and played back at a later date, or seemingly instantaneously. (Berg 94)

Initially, the purpose of the earliest phonographs was to record only the human voice as some kind of office Dictaphone in some kind of ‘spin-off’ from telephonic technologies. Here is a description of how the first Edison phonograph worked:

The device was entirely mechanical. A drum, covered with tin-foil, was mounted on an axle which could be cranked. As the handle turned the drum moved a stylus which was connected to a diaphragm. The diaphragm was mounted in a crude speaking/hearing tube. Speaking into the tube while cranking the handle produced a helical indentation in the tinfoil, an analogue of the sound pressure waves, via the diaphragm and stylus. Playback simply required cranking the drum back to the start position and allowing the indentations to vibrate the other way; that is, via the stylus against the diaphragm. (Winston 61)

In other words, the idea was to scratch the speech of a subject onto waxed paper (although as you can see in the above quotation, tin-foil was the first type of medium used successfully) and to play back such speech at a time so desired. Thomas A. Edison foresaw the recording and storage of human speech as a means of facilitating education and preserving languages. (Gelatt 10-11)  The idea of storing and archiving the human voice was there from the earliest days of the phonograph. As well as the two reasons stated, Thomas A. Edison listed ten ways in total that the invention of the phonograph could benefit human kind including: letter writing without a stenographer, the playing of phonographic books for the blind, elocution teaching, recording music, talking clocks and a registry of family history (of voices). (as cited in Gelatt 10-11)  Further, it is generally recognised that the first words heard played back on Edison’s phonograph were ‘Mary had a little lamb’, uttered by one of Edison’s mechanics. (Winston 61)   No wonder these early devices were known as ‘talking machines’. 

One of the problems with the tin foil and the later wax cylinder storage devices used by Edison was that they did not stand up very well to repeated playing. They were in fact very noisy, the disembodied voice often buried in a veil of static or the like (witness the examples on the following web pages: (Sage) http://www.tinfoil.com/ or (Library of Congress) http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edhome.html ). This ‘noisiness’ created problems and as the novelty of the first recordings wore off, a search for better ways of recording and playing back began as it became more and more obvious that the machines could only reach a higher potential if they were better able to reproduce the sounds they recorded. (Gelatt 12)  Such problems with the phonograph together with costs involved in protecting patents, led Edison to abandon the device. Not until the mid-1890s when rival inventors’ sound recording machines hit the market and the possibilities for synching sound and film became more and more discussed did Edison and his company begin to once again explore the possibilities of sound recording devices.

Edison’s main rival for the phonograph business was a German immigrant, Emile Berliner. After several years of failure, Berliner began marketing what he called the gramophone in 1894. There were several significant differences between Edison’s phonograph and Berliner’s gramophone. Where Edison’s device could both record and play back, Berliner’s could only play back. The phonograph recorded onto wax-coated cylinders using a ‘hill-and-dale’ vertical recording method while the gramophone played back on seven inch, hard-rubber discs with a laterally moving stylus. (Gelatt 35-41)

The point to consider here is that late-nineteenth century mechanical devices were designed to separate (deterritorialise) the human voice and music from a physical presence. Attempts were made to reterritorialise the voice and music through (eventually) successful attempts to synchronise sound on film and of course, the production of records.

It is perhaps worth noting that the invention of recorded music had a huge economic impact as well as a cultural one. Before the invention of radio and gramophone records, the only way people could hear about new songs was to be in the presence of a live performer. In the United States alone, by 1909 more than 27 million gramophone/phonograph records and cylinders were manufactured while the wholesale value of printed sheet music soared from US$1.7 million in 1890 to US$5.5 million by 1909. (Sanjek 23, 33-34)  By 1921 about 200 different companies were producing ‘talking-machines’ of some kind in the USA alone. Accordingly, retail sales of recorded music peaked at US$106.5 million, “a figure … not exceeded for twenty-six years”. (Sanjek 62)

A Reflection

Before moving on, at this point it might be useful to step back for a moment. While Edison is credited as being the first to construct a machine that could record sound and then play it back, the idea that such a device could be built had circulated since the early nineteenth century. A device called the Phonautograph was unveiled in France in 1857. This device could record sound by using a needle attached to a vibrating membrane.  Sounds of various pitches and timbres were made in front of this membrane causing the needle to mark a spinning plate. However, the machine could not play back. (Scholes 421)

Twenty years later, and just prior to Edison announcing the invention of his phonograph, Charles Cros, a Frenchman, put the idea in writing of a machine that could reverse the recording process and thus playback what it had recorded. But it was Edison who first was able to actually construct such a device.

It is said that Edison was not taken with the device initially and saw its main use as an office-dictating machine. As the previous quotation from Winston indicates, these hand-cranked machines etched sounds from a vibrating needle onto cylinders wrapped in tin foil. As it became obvious that tin foil was not a very suitable medium (it couldn’t take repeated playing), softer wax replaced it. This in turn was replaced by shellac by Emile Berliner. Berliner also replaced the cylinder with a plate that revolved on a turntable (in 1888) and the predecessor to the vinyl record as we know it today was born. Not knowing what to do with his invention (the idea of recording music had not come into vogue), Berliner proposed and invented talking dolls that contained miniature versions of these ‘talking machines’. (Scholes 422)

Dave Laing makes the observation that while the technology for recording sound had been around since the late 1870s, it was not until the mid-1890s that demand for recorded music really began to ‘take off’.(1)  Of importance to this argument, is Laing’s comment that the development of the phonograph greatly impacted upon the music listening experience, replacing “an audio-visual event with … sound without vision”.(7)   Here Laing is stating what may seem obvious: the experience of listening to music before the development of sound recording technologies involved having to watch the music being performed by people: “Unlike vaudeville performances or family recitals, the phonograph offered a disembodied voice”. (Laing 7)

With the advent of improved methods of not just recording but also successful methods of duplicating multiple copies of a single recording, the need to be in the physical presence of a performer in order to hear music was removed. What replaced it was a form of absence that carried with it its own form of presence: a technologically mediated one.  Such a presence based on absence affected the music listening experience. Douglas Kahn offers an interesting take on the influence of the development of the phonograph: “[With the invention of the phonograph], no longer was the ability to hear oneself speak restricted to a fleeting moment. It became locked in a materiality that could both stand still and mute and also time travel by taking one's voice far afield from one's own presence”. (8)

Listening to music became a virtual experience that was also linked to a physical materiality devoid of human presence. The human voice became deterritorialised and reterritorialised through the workings of a machine.

Acoustic Recording vs Electric Recording

The early recording devices employed an acoustic method of recording. It can be termed as such because the whole process of recording and playing back was “the result of the action of sound vibrations”.(Scholes 422)   Using a horn shaped device to capture the sounds, a vibrating needle cut into a soft wax record from which was made a hard master copy that could in turn, by the manufacture of a mould, be copied in vast amounts onto shellac copies.

Electrically recorded disks sounded superior to the acoustic ones but had few other significant differences. The process however was slightly different because of the use of microphone technology. Electrical recording was introduced in 1925 removing the need to move an instrument like the piano around a studio to get the right balance of sound (recording horns for pianos had to be huge to pick up the notes). With the invention of microphone electrical recording, musicians had a greater flexibility in the studio and could set-up and record much in the same way that they performed on a stage. For the first time, every instrument in a large orchestra could be recorded. (Toynbee 76-77)

Before the development of electrical recording however, the process of recording meant that every recording made was a ‘master’. In order to record or produce multiple copies of a song, performers had to literally record them over and over. Singers would sometimes sing into the horns of up to twelve manually synchronised machines at a time. Citing the example of the opera singer Peter Dawson, Scholes notes how Dawson, recording in 1904, would make a dozen ‘master’ recordings each time he sang a song: “And he would continue to repeat the same song for six hours a day, five days a week”.(Scholes 423)  Needless to say, the recording process before digital multitracked recording and mass manufacturing technologies was a laborious process indeed!

The limitations of the early recording processes affected the size of orchestras because not only could the horn used to capture the sounds of instruments not fit all the instruments, some instruments, like the piano and cello, could not be picked up by it successfully (without some effort). After the invention and successful deployment of the microphone, recording could be more mobile and more complete because all instruments could be recorded.

The very first opera to be recorded appeared across forty one-sided records in 1903. Double sided records didn’t appear until 1905. Up until about 1920, the movements in classical recordings were cut to fit onto records. The invention of the long-playing record helped alleviate that although compromises in performance had to be considered because only so much music could fit on each side of a record. In 1948 the first long-playing gramophone record was successfully released (previous attempts since the 1920s had failed). This meant that a 30 cm record could fit up to twenty-six minutes per side compared to the four to six minutes of earlier recordings. Slowing down the turntable speed and narrowing the grooves on the record surface achieved this. (Scholes 423-424)

Another factor that facilitated the invention of long-playing records was the invention of vinyl. More flexible than shellac, vinyl was developed by the CBS Corporation in the United States during the Second World War after the Japanese had cut off shellac supplies by “invading the Malay peninsula”. (Winston 134)

Scholes, who appears to be somewhat of a classical music elitist, reports that up until the mid-1920s some serious music publications and musicians still doubted the place of the gramophone in society, proclaiming it to be “a disagreeable toy” or some kind of “office adjunct”. (as cited in Scholes 424) As I have already stated, the idea of recording music was not in the foreground of the minds of those who invented the gramophone or phonograph. It was seen to be of use as a storage device, an office machine, or a teaching tool. (Middleton 84)   Laing makes this point even clearer: “Edison’s first use of the term ‘phonograph’ was in connection with the question of recording the human voice at the receiving end of a telephone line”. (Laing 3)

I have already mentioned some of them, but among the other uses that Edison envisioned for the phonograph was as a device to make noises such as whistles and train exhaust sounds for use in toys, as well as a device for playing tunes as a type of music box.  In other words, Edison saw the phonograph as both a talking machine and a musical instrument. (Laing 4)   The irony is that a machine that was originally developed as a device for the recording and playback of sounds, gave way in popularity to a machine that could only ever playback something recorded elsewhere. Cylinders that could be recorded on gave way to plates or records that could only playback. There are many opinions and theories as to why this happened (including the fact that cylinders became more expensive to produce and had limited shelf lives) and there is not the space here to delve deeper into this issue. But one idea is worth noting. Laing says that one of the key reasons for the change in public acceptance of the phonograph as a playback device of music was in its being marketed in to the home as a machine that “provided the trace, the evidence of a specific performance by a specific artist”. (Laing 6)   While other instruments of the time such as Pianolas played back music via perforated rolls, records played back on a phonograph had more of an authentic feel to them. They were seen as entertainment machines that were able to successfully reproduce the moment of human performance.

Following its early days as a recording device, the phonograph became just a playback machine. Once enjoyed mainly by elites, the boom in popular music sales that coincided with the success of radio in the early part of the 20^th century meant that record players became marketed and sold to an ever-increasing demanding public. However, partly due to cost factors and deficiencies in sound quality, it should be noted here that record players did not really achieve massive popularity until after the mid-1950s. As late as 1953, only one in five households across the United States owned a phonograph. By early 1961, following the birth of rock and roll and improvements in recording technology, over 30 million homes in the USA owned a record player. (Sanjek 333, 363)  And while the technology was refined and tweaked along the way (e.g. changes in speed from 78 rpm to 33 1/3 and 45 rpm, improved sensitivity of styli and cartridges), the popular record player or turntable remained a playback device. However, After seemingly going out of vogue following the introduction of the one-sided, 5 inch (or 12.7 cm) compact disc (CD) in the early 1980s, the growth in the popularity of hip hop or rap and an increasing growth in dance music has seen the turntable once again reach new uses as not just a playback machine but as an instrument in its own right. The increasing hybridity of popular music where hip-hop has been appropriated by so-called ‘nu-metal’ acts (Limp Bizkit, 28 Days, and Linkin Park are just a few that come to mind) has increased the visibility of the turntable across many forms of popular music. Add to this the desire of certain alternative acts to release limited edition pressings of vinyl for collectors and fans and it is easy to see a long term future for the technology despite the ability of electronic samplers and synthesizers to replicate the scratching sounds of turntables.

Magnetic Tape and Studio Wizardry

The general bulkiness and crudeness of phonographic technology led inventors to look for alternative methods of recording sound, even when the phonograph was undergoing substantial bursts of popularity. The earliest reported successful attempt to record using a form of magnetic tape was in 1899. Vladimir Poulsen’s Telegraphone won a Grand Prix at the Paris Exposition in 1900 as the “first all-electrical recording and reproducing device”. (Gelatt 219)  Using a carbon telephone transmitter, sound was converted into electrical impulses, setting in motion an electromagnetic recording head. A demagnetised steel wire or ribbon passed under this head, getting magnetised in the process. To reproduce the sound recorded onto the wire or ribbon, the operator merely had to reverse the process. The benefits of recording onto wire or ribbon were that recordings lasted many plays longer than records or cylinders plus rather than the four minutes of playback offered by the best cylinders of the time, Poulsen’s ribbon Telegraphone could record and playback up to an hour’s worth of material. The biggest disadvantage over disks or cylinders was the quality of sound: it was not possible to hear anything louder than what could be heard from a telephone receiver therefore the wire or ribbon recorders were totally unsuitable for the recording of music.

As amplifiers and microphones improved so did efforts to record on magnetic tape. It wasn’t until the mid to late 1940s that successful recording and reproduction of music on tape could be marketed. This came about through the invention of an iron oxide coated magnetic tape that facilitated better quality and reproducibility. One of the first customers for this new tape was Bing Crosby who had been trying to find a way to record his radio shows. Soon tape became the medium for recording in the radio industry, enabling the recording and playing back of shows. Important for both the industry and the general public came the ability to capture events and play them back at a later date, but this time with much greater success than had ever been possible with the phonograph. Tape was compact and lightweight and could be repaired if it snapped. Recording disks were bulky, scratched easily, wore out after only thirty or more plays, were useless and discarded if they broke, notwithstanding their restricted playing time. (Gelatt 220-221)

It was in the recording studio that tape began to make its mark. From 1949 onwards, tape recorders replaced the limited direct recording techniques of recording directly onto wax acetates. Tape was able to be erased and pieces re-recorded to fix up mistakes; editing could be facilitated on tape whereas this was not possible on direct to wax recordings. This editing was important to the recording process because it meant that several pieces could be recorded separately and later joined together. This was the birth of the multichannel recording process and overdubbing. Musicians could record their individual parts separately and at different times. Small groups could sound like orchestras on the completed record. Recordings became a sum of parts, often devoid of being restricted to notions of ‘real time’.  In the recording process itself, because tape could run for thirty minutes or more without having to be changed, musicians had greater freedom in the studio to experiment. However, while tapes came into direct competition with records (pre-recorded music recordings came on sale in 1954 in the USA and Britain) they initially did not replace them. (Gelatt 220-231)

It wasn’t until the invention of the portable cassette recorder and player in the 1960s that music on tape began to seriously affect record sales. By the late 1980s, cassettes were outselling vinyl records. The invention of the CD soon had an even greater impact as vinyl pressing plants were closed worldwide. The digital CD (as apart from the analogue LP) almost killed off the vinyl record. Now, with vinyl for all intents and purposes gone from the shelves of most music stores, the humble cassette has also just about disappeared.

Digital audio tape (DAT) and the mini-disc are just two other formats that have just about ‘killed off’ sales of pre-recorded music cassettes although domestic markets have not really embraced these new media. 

Conclusion and Summary

Although this has been a survey history, I hope you can realise that there have been many changes in the history of recording music. From the earliest days of artists simultaneously recording multiple versions of the same song into the horns of up to a dozen phonographs, to the modern digital multitracked recording studio, one of the most significant changes to have taken place is the fact that exact duplicates of an ‘original’ take can be made over and over without the presence of a performer. Not only that, but the performer may only ever have to sing/play the song but once.

Arguably the most significant occurrence in the history of audio technology was making the technology appealing for the ‘everyman’. In other words, once the domestification of the technology was possible (i.e. affordable), further developments for the industry took place. Recording technology has changed through history seeing the development of machines that could capture the sounds of a culture and store them for future reference or entertainment; the music making process has been revolutionised, and with the advent of digital recording, the chronicling of human endeavours is becoming more and more contentious. The portability factor has become an even more important one in this ‘digital age’, and is one that will be pursued in a later lecture.

Finally, it is no accident that a large part of this lecture was spent detailing developments in recording technologies during the late nineteenth century. For it was during this time that most of the technologies that we are familiar with today were either invented or in the very least, thought about and discussed. Did you know for example, that in about 1888 or 1889 Emil Berliner, the inventor of the gramophone, applied for a patent for a machine that could record onto the bottom side of a disc only, with such disc being 5 inches in diameter and playing from the inside out? Sound familiar? While the disc and its machine never made it into existence in the form that Berliner detailed, it is clear that when we start to think that all around us is ‘new’ and innovative, perhaps we need to stop and look back before plunging forward.

Works Cited

Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Bruits: Essai sur L'economie Politique de la Musique. Trans. Brian Massumi. Theory and History of Literature. Eds. Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse. Vol. 16. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 1999 Sixth Printing.

Berg, Charles M. "Visualizing Music: The Archaeology of Music Video." OneTwoThreeFour: A Rock 'n' Roll Quarterly.5 (1987): 94-103.

Gelatt, Roland. The Fabulous Phonograph: The Story of the Gramophone from Tin Foil to High Fidelity. London: Cassell & Company, 1956.

Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999.

Laing, David. "A Voice without a Face: Popular Music and the Phonograph in the 1890s." Popular Music 10.1 (1991): 1-9.

Library of Congress. American Memory: Inventing Entertainment, the Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies. 20 May 2002. Web page. Available: http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edhome.html.

Middleton, Richard. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes, England; Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990.

Sage, Glenn. Early Recorded Sounds and Wax Cylinders. 02 June 2002. Web site. Available: http://www.tinfoil.com/.

Sanjek, Russell. American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years. Vol. III: From 1900 to 1984. 3 vols. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Scholes, P. A. The Oxford Companion to Music. 9th ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1955.

Toynbee, Jason. Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions. London: Arnold, 2000.

Winston, Brian. Media, Technology and Society. London & New York: Routledge, 1998.