Early Recorded Sound-Julian Callan

In 1857, douard-Lon Scott de Martinville invented the phonautograph and it was the first device able to record sound. It sounded like this: SOUND 1Pretty impressive. The phonautograph recorded onto a roll of paper but wasnt actually able to play back the sound it recorded, it was more of an attempt to capture and view the waveforms of the sound.In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the first device capable of both recording and playing back sound and recorded Mary Had a Little Lamb onto a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a cylinder. SOUND 2The tinfoil wasnt really a practical method of recording though as it was too fragile. Edison then developed wax cylinders which could be used to store music or any other sounds. Each cylinder could only play about 2 minutes of music. SOUND 3At the start of the 20th Century, Emile Berliner filed his patent for the gramophone, a device that would record onto and play back gramophone records. The early discs could only play a few minutes but as technology improved, the discs could hold more and more music. This led to a huge rivalry between Edisons cylinders and Berliners records, not completely different to the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format war a few years ago.As Berliners records grew in popularity, Edison tried to recover his foothold of the industry by releasing cylinders with much better sound quality. These were much more expensive and only popular amongst the audiophiles of the era.Edison tried his hand at the record game, producing his Diamond Disc but these things were huge and expensive and ultimately failed.

In the early days of recording, sound was recorded acoustically onto cylinders or discs. What this means is that basically the musicians stood around a big horn and tried to make as much noise as possible. The noise was transmitted down the horn and onto a needle that would vibrate and etch the sound onto a cylinder or disc. This was pretty impractical for many reasons: All the musicians had to play at the same time. There was no room for mistakes so if anything went wrong, the song had to be started from scratch. There was only a very basic form of mixing involved. Usually the loudest instrument was placed furthest from the horn. Sound quality was often very poor. There was virtually no way to overdub anything onto the music and the performance was basically live.All this changed with the event of the microphone.Again, Berliner and Edison had their rivaling versions of the device, both patented around the same time, literally within four months of each other. Whoever came up with the idea first is irrelevant. What cannot be stressed enough is how important both these mens contributions where to the early world of sound recording.Once the microphone had been established, musicians were able to record electronically, allowing for much greater audio quality to the recording. At the time, recordings were still being made directly onto the disc but the microphone paved the way for virtually every sound recording technique we have today.

BOOKS RESEARCHEDPerfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music- Greg MilnerMaster Handbook of Acoustics- F. Alton EverestModern Recording Techniques, Sixth Edition - David Miles Huber,Robert E. Runstein