Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Recorded Sound

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

One of the landmark inventions in human history was the ability to record sound.  This technology allowed music to go from something only appreciated by a small number of people to something which could be enjoyed by millions.  It also allowed people to speak to others across vast distances and eventually led to a thing called podcasting. Learn more about the history of recorded sound and how we went from wax cylinders to mp3s on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast. Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the landmark inventions in human history was the ability to record sound. This technology allowed music to go from something only appreciated by a small number of rich people to something which could be enjoyed by millions. And it also allowed people to speak to others across vast distances and eventually led to a thing called podcasting. Learn more about the history of recorded sound and how we went from wax cylinders to MP3s on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Normally when I talk about the development of a tool or technology, some extremely early version of it predated the modern version by hundreds or even thousands of years. That is not the case with the problem. recording of sound. There is nothing we can point to before the mid-19th century, which is even a proto version of sound recording. And I have to acknowledge an urban legend and news story which broke several years ago, which claimed that sound waves had been etched into wet pottery when it was

being shaped. And in one claim, the noise of Mount Vesuvius erupting had been captured in a clay pot moments before it was buried in volcanic ash. All of these stories have been debunked. Not only is there no evidence, but given how clay pots are made, it would be almost impossible for a needle to etch sound waves into them using ancient tools. That being said, the problem of capturing sound waves is a relatively straightforward one. Sound consists of vibrations that travel through the air. It is fundamentally a physical phenomenon. If you can convert the vibrations in the air to a physical object, then you could, in theory, capture the sound. The first person we have evidence of who was able to capture sound waves was the French inventor, Edward Leon Scott de Martinville. He created a device

called a phone autograph. He designed the device to mimic the human ear with a drum that would vibrate from sound, and then move a stylus that would make marks on a piece of paper covered in carbon black. The device was not designed to record sound intended for playback, but rather was simply a laboratory tool used to study sound waves. The idea of reversing the process to playback sound was still 20 years away. However, many of Scott's recordings, which were just black pieces of paper survived with the soundwave images intact. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs in 2008 use digital audio tools to recreate the sound waves captured by Scott's phone autograph. These sounds are now considered the oldest sound recordings in the world, and they

predate the previous earliest recordings by 28 years. Here is a short clip of Scott singing O'Clair de la Loon on April 9, 1860, the oldest recording of a human voice, in history. So, yeah, okay, the quality isn't very good. But then again, you can clearly identify a human voice, and most importantly, this was recorded 162 years ago. Scott's system was neither practical nor useful. It was a laboratory tool. There were several people in the later half the 19th century who were trying to develop something which could both record and playback sound. In 1877, a French poet by the name of Charles Kosz designed a system for recording and playing back sound. He even submitted the idea in a sealed letter to the French Academy of Science in April

that year, but he never built a working prototype. He called his device the paleophone. Because he never actually built anything, he has seldom credited with the invention of sound recording. However, a few months later, the American inventor Thomas Edison began working on a similar device. He announced his new invention in November, and called it the phonograph. Edison's impetus was to record sounds that were transmitted over the newly invented telephone, which had been announced the year before. Edison's first system was entirely mechanical, and by that I mean there was no electricity involved. The first recordings were etched onto tin foil which was wrapped around a cylinder. You had to speak into a horn that would collect the sound that vibrated a membrane, which

moved a stylus that would make indentations into the foil. Needless to say, the sound quality was quite poor, and each recording had to be a custom job. Edison usually threw away his old tinfoil recordings because they were useless after a few plays. However, one recording from 1878 was found and recovered. It's Edison reciting, Mary had a little lamb. Again, the sound quality isn't great, but at least in this case, you can actually make out the words. The first efforts at duplicating a recording involved hooking up the recording device to 10 different cylinders, and eventually it was possible to have over 100 cylinders all recording.

However, if you wanted 100 more cylinders, you had to do a new recording all over again. To this extent, every recording was an original master copy. In the 1890s, one of the first recording stars was an African American musician by the name of George W. Johnson. Johnson had the best-selling recordings in the country, and may have sold as many as 50,000 cylinders. However, he had to literally record the same song hundreds of times in order to make all of the recordings. Here is a version of The Laughing Song that he recorded in 1898. So now kind friend just listen So what I'm going to say

I've tried to play business You're in my simple Or whether you think it's funny Or a quiet bit of death Edison's system that required artists to record the same thing Dozens of times a day simply wasn't sustainable The solution came from an invention by Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Labs They developed a system for recording onto a wax disc

that was called a graphophone. Whereas Edison etched the sound waves onto foil, the graphophone engraved the sound waves into wax. Bell created the Volta Graphophone Company, which via a series of mergers, is still alive today in the Columbia Record Company. There wasn't a big quality difference between a disc and a cylinder,

but there was a huge difference in the ability to produce and distribute recordings. A wax disc could literally be turned into a metal plate, which could then be used to press out records in a factory. In past episodes, I've talked about inventions like the light bulb, the steam engine, and the printing press. What they all had in common was that the system which won wasn't the first one developed. It was the first one to create a practical system. In this case, it wasn't the graphophone.

It was a system developed by the German-American inventor, Emile Berliner. He created a system called the Gramophone, and you've probably seen at least one photo of a gramophone. It has a large horn where the sound comes out, and if you've ever seen a Grammy Award, it's a small statue of a gramophone. His gramophone players and records were the first to find real commercial success. The term gramophone was basically synonymous with record player in the early 20th century. The next big innovation in recording sound occurred in the early 20th century, with the advent of the electrical microphone. The microphone could convert a sound wave into an electrical signal.

This allowed for amplification, as well as balancing other sound inputs. The Western Electric Corporation developed an entire suite of electrical sound products, which greatly improved sound quality. Amplification allowed for quieter instruments, such as strings, to be recorded on an equal footing with louder instruments such as brass. Electricity also allowed for the creation of electrical gramophones, as they were called, which used a motor to power the turntable and an amplified loudspeaker for the sound.

However, at the end of this electrical system, it was still a disc made out of wax with grooves mechanically cut into it. The next big leap occurred after the Second World War. The Germans had been using a technology invented in the 1930s called the magnetic tape. Magnetic tape was a huge breakthrough in sound quality. American radio engineers during the war knew that the Germans had some unknown technology when the quality of their recorded radio broadcasts was as good as their live broadcasts. Starting in the early 1950s, magnetic tape was used for almost all master sound recordings. Not only was it better, but it could record each track independently.

This allowed for various instruments, or even completely different takes, to be edited together after recording. Perhaps most importantly, it led to the development of stereo sound recordings, where different sounds would come out of different speakers. The difference between music recorded on tape versus music recorded directly to wax was similar to standard definition television versus high definition television. You can hear a very clear difference in sound quality between music recorded before the early 1950s and after. And if you want a really good example, go to your favorite music service and listen to any song by Frank Sinatra that was recorded in the 1940s versus anything he recorded in the 1950s. Improvements in recording quality

led to the development of high fidelity sound systems for consumers. There were advancements in the distribution of music as well. quality of vinyl improved the sound quality of records. And a new format known as the long-playing disc, or LP, was also introduced, allowing more music to be played on a single record side. LPs also spun at a slower 33-and-a-third rotations per minute, compared to the 78 RPM's of older records. An LP could hold as much as 22 minutes of music on a single side. While recording was now done on tape, it took a while to distribute music on tape. Real-to-reel tape players were sold in the 50s and 60s, but they were mostly only for people with high-end sound systems because the tape's

sound quality was better than vinyl. Plus, you could listen to an entire symphony without having to flip the record over. While reel-to-reel had high quality, it was very cumbersome to play. That problem was solved with the development of magnetic tapes in cartridges. The first popular cartridge tape was called the Stereo 8, or as it's better known, the 8-track tape. A consortium developed the 8-track tape standard in 1963, and it was already being installed as an option in Ford cars as early as 1965. A-tracks were extremely popular from the late 60s through the 70s, as it was the first recorded musical format that could be used in automobiles or portable devices. Sales peaked in 1978, and the market had completely disappeared by 1983. What replaced it was the compact cassette

tape. Developed in 1963 by the Dutch Phillips Corporation, it was much smaller and much easier to use, than an A-track tape. I remember having a big rack of tapes in high school. That was the primary music format that everyone used, and there were even better suited for cars and portable devices. It was the cassette tape that led to the popularity of the boombox. Moreover, unlike A-tracks, you could buy blank tapes to record your own sounds, or, to the bane of the music industry, you could copy music. Cassettes for the first time allowed users to mix and match songs and create what became known as mixed tapes. The cassette era was actually pretty short-lived, however, because just a few years after it gained

ascendance, the digital audio compact disc, or CD, was introduced. A joint project of the Phillips and Sony Corporation, the CD had many advantages over cassettes and LPs. For starters, the sound quality of digital music, in almost every blind test, is considered to be much higher. Second, while CDs were susceptible to damage, they were much more forgiving than cassettes and LPs were. Playing a CD didn't involve any physical contact unlike a record needle or a tapehead. You could play them in a car like a cassette, yet it also had album art like an LP. The length of a CD was set at 74 minutes, because the wife of the then Sony CEO Akio Marita felt that an entire recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony should be able to fit on a single disc, and the longest

version they could find was 74 minutes. The industry went through yet another cycle of a new format replacing the old format. But it turned out that the CD was to be the last major physical music format. The 1990s saw the rise of the internet. CDs and the early internet didn't really work together because the music on a CD was uncompressed, which made the file sizes very large. What turned the internet into a vehicle for sound was compression. The ability to take a digital file and make it smaller without any noticeable diminishment of sound quality. The technology that made the internet a platform for sound was the Moving Pitchers Experts Group 2, Audio Layer 3 format, commonly known as MP3.

It was developed by the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany in 1991, and it was able to condense digital music down to a fraction of its original size. Fun fact, the song used by the engineers to test the MP3 platform was Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega. The MP3 format changed everything. Music went from being a physical object to data. When combined with a worldwide computer network like the internet, it meant that everyone could have everything.

Instead of letting a friend copy your cassette tape, you could now share a music file with everyone in the world. This led to services such as Napster and LimeWire where people traded music openly and for free. But the music industry wasn't going to have any of that, so they were all eventually shut down. And in their place arose streaming services like Spotify, where you had to pay a monthly fee or listen to advertisements between songs.

This two radically changed how people consumed music. Music used to be limited to what you owned. Now everyone has access to almost everything recorded all the time. There are a host of different digital audio formats, but several years ago, the Fraunhofer Institute released all of their intellectual property surrounding the MP3 format. Even though other formats are arguably better, MP3 is good enough, and has simply become ubiquitous.

The recording you're listening to right now is an MP3 file. In fact, you can think of this podcast as being representative of the state of the art in audio. And by that, I don't mean I have the best or latest audio gear, because I don't. It's because I am able to record this entire episode, by myself, with common consumer products, upload it to a computer, and have tens of thousands of people around the world listen to it in just a matter of minutes. The democratization of sound recording and easy free global distribution of audio is something that Edward Leon Scott could never have imagined when he recorded the first shapes of sound waves on paper 162 years ago.

Everything Everywhere Daily is an airwave media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just wanted to extend a big thank you to everyone who is supporting the show over at patreon.com. I have show merchandise available there, including hoodies, t-shirts, and stickers. Plus, it really just helps me get this show out every single day, including, of course, weekends and holidays. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it read on the show.