Category: THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC
Posted by Angelika in THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC Tuesday, 9 February 2010 09:11 No Comments
Part 27. “Get Hip To The Beat Daddio!”
The History of the Phonograph. Chapter 5
Welcome Back!
Rudolph Valentino - wow man like whatta Rebel..
Ok, so in the last chapter, we covered the technological revolution that put the record player firmly into the no1 position as the tool for audio playback.
But at the same time another revolution was happening across the western world, especially in America.
In February 1949, RCA Victor released the very first 45rpm single, only 7 inches in diameter it had a large hole in it’s center so that it could be fitted to devices that had an automatic playing mechanism, allowing singles to be dropped down in a stack on top of each other per play.
These singles had a playing time of 4 minutes each side and were made from Vinyl or polystyrene.
Singles were mass-produced and cheap to buy, they were so wide spread that they could often be found on the counter of the local drugstore.
To coincide with this new hobby of collecting singles the Top 40 was started by Todd Storz from the KOWH radio station.
But the single was not so much the revolution but part of it’s fuel.
The revolutionaries appeared on the scene sprouting strange words and listening to far out beats. The Teenager had arrived.
From the country that brought you pancake stacks comes the 45 stacks.. not as nutricious, but certainly tasty..
Before the 1950’s there was almost no transitionary time between childhood and adulthood. Children were taught to think as their parents, have the same thoughts as their parents and generally act like mini me’s. You either went to school a child and left school as an adult or you enlisted as a child and came back a man.
But starting in the 50’s young people 16-18 started ‘hanging out’ doing their own thing and listening to their own music, they devoured pop music and made it their own, they had enough pocket money to afford 45’s and portable radios, and with the smaller record size came smaller more portable 45 only players. The teenagers didn’t have phonographs, only squares called them that, they played their singles on ‘record players’. The music scene gave them their own language, and with all that came their ‘own ideas’.
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.
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What started as the 50′s rebel who was like this..
With the advent of the 60’s and Rock’n’roll, this developed even further, the ‘devils music’ made teenagers question authority and believe in the ideals of their own generation. The ‘50’s teenager was old enough to really start to make waves, not the least being in a band and making their own music.
Granted there were also other socio/political factors involved, but for this discourse lets mainly focus on the music side of things.
Ended up like this! (go Jimi!!)
The fab four, take note of Ringo in his Cross-dressing phase - eat your heart out Bowie.
This was an incredible boom for the record industry, for the music industry, and for radio and television stations. This is what gave the teenager power. As much as their parents may have been against this new behavior, it was the money that they gave their kids that helped fuel it.
The teenager still drives the music market today. Channel V and MTV’s core demographic is between 12 – 15 years of age.
Also almost a small side note, in 1963 with nothing more than a small tiny splash, Phillips introduced the first compact cassette tape. But it wouldn’t be until this little wonder was a teenager itself before anyone in the music industry would start to take notice.
Some people say that during the 70’s, as people were recovering from the shock of the 60’s, they took the best of the decade before and improved on them. Rock’nRoll, free love and giving young people a voice against corruption and war to name a few.
If you believe this to be true or not, it’s true as far as the rsord player is concerned.
CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT WHY IN PART 28
CLICK HERE for the previous chapter
CLICK HERE for the INDEX of History Of Electronic Music
Posted by Angelika in THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC Monday, 1 February 2010 15:44 No Comments
Part 26. The Golden Age Of Hi-Fi.
The History of the Phonograph. Chapter 4
Everyone in the band is wearing a life jacket, i'm not sure if it's a lack of confidence in the boat they're on, or their ability as musicians..
Well even though the news promises to get better soon, we also start on a low note. World War Two.
Most records at the time were made from a rather brittle formula of Shellac, powdered slate, a cotton compound similar to manilla paper and wax lubricant.
Vinyl was first used in 1939 for a cigarette commercial that was mailed to radio stations, the reason they used vinyl was that it’s flexibility meant it was much less likely to break in the mail.
This new surface while more prone to scratches and static and dust build up, had a much lower surface noise level.
But initially it was simply it’s durability for mailing that increased it’s popularity, companies that sent both music and commercials to radio stations began to send vinyl through the mail.
During WWII, The armed forces created thousands of records called V discs for the soldiers to play, they were all pressed on Vinyl, both because of it’s durability and that shellac was in short supply due to Japans invasion of South east Asia.
Incidentally, it’s those brave souls, who, armed to the teeth with V-discs would play records for the soldiers during R’n’R that were known as the first DJ’s!
Here’s a clip of the wonderful Vera Lyn singing we’ll meet again in 1941, it’s accompanied by images from world war 2 (no jokes here for this one)
After WWII, the turntable’s only real major competition was the radio, but as each device had a distinct advantage over each over, they were able to each carve it’s own niche. Radio provides information, entertainment and music that you don’t own, infinitely for the one entry price, so it’s value is immense, but the freedom of choice is limited to the programming available from the various stations. Record players on the other hand give you the control of playing whatever you have access to, whenever you want, how you want. The turntable provides a better sound, allows the freedom of choice, the freedom of self expression, and also fuels the rather powerful addiction of collecting.
Also lets not forget that even the radio depended on record for a large portion of their broadcasting content.
All of these strengths were capitalised on after WWII.
In 1931 RCA Victor was the first company to attempt to release long player records, but failed due to the hardships of the great depression.
For those of you born after 1995 this is what an Vinyl LP looks like!
Columbia Records spent 9 years on research and development for their version of the 12inch (30cm) LP (long player) and released the 33½ rpm microgroove record in 1948. These were made of vinyl and as such had a low surface noise.
Soon new methods of recording and mastering were adopted onto vinyl records such as equalization curves and the use of reel to reel magnetic tape recording technology that was found in Germany after the war.
Sound quality had made a quantum leap.
The 50’s saw the first breed of “Audiophiles’ – people who were concerned with getting the very best hearing quality out of the much improved sound embedded in their new LP’s. These Audio purists came about as result of the development of High Fidelity – or hi-fi sound.
This was achieved through buying separate complex highly engineered components, such as turntables, loudspeakers, pre-amplifiers, and power amplifiers, all with the cumulative effect of a greater frequency response and much higher power output capability, allowing the playing of much greater audio peaks without distortion.
Then in 1958 sound experienced another quantum improvement.
I'm not sure if this diagram makes things clearer or will just complicate the issue..
To get a little geeky for second, it was thanks to the development of the Westrex single-groove 45/45 stereophonic record cutting lathe.
In basic terms the stylus (record needle) achieved stereo playback by by reading differences in signal vertically (up and down) as well as the mono-recording’s standard horizontal movement. (side to side).
For a far more technical description CLICK HERE
Gradually, People referred to playing records on their ‘stereo’ as well as ‘hi-fi’ thus the terms were coined and began to replace the use of ‘phonograph’ and ‘gramophone’
It should be said that, according to Audiophiles hi-fi has another meaning:
a playback system that aims to use the best available technology to achieve the purest or truest fidelity to the recorded music.The 50′s and early 60′s is often referred to as “The Golden Age of Hi-Fi” as this was a time when many audio components were created using tube equipment, many now famous for their warmth and clarity. Lots of purists believe that quality fell dramatically with the subsequent introduction of solid-state systems.
In the next chapter we’re going to look at the other revolution that changed the face of music forever. It’s revolutionaries dressed funny, were not very tall, and had their own strange language.. To find out just who they were in CLICK HERE.
I might be showing my age here, but that is a seriously cool looking bit of kit - Cool name too.. "the Quad II Power Amplifier"
For part 27 CLICK HERE.
CLICK HERE for the previous chapter
CLICK HERE for the INDEX of History Of Electronic Music
Posted by Angelika in THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC Monday, 18 January 2010 14:37 No Comments
Part 25. The Power of Electricity.
The History of the Phonograph. Chapter 3
Because the sounding horns were so big, people started to see just how big they could make their hats..
... and he won!
Welcome back! In Chapter 2, we discovered how the phonograph and the gramophone became linked to the music industry. Starting out as a novelty, people began to use it to treasure their favorite music. Unfortunately both the recording methods and the playback left a lot to be desired.
Which is a good segue to kick off our next chapter..
Thanks to the invention of the vacuum tube in 1915, the 20’s saw the record player enjoy 2 big jumps in it’s evolution.
Fittingly the first was in the recording of music and the second was in the playback.
As often happens in highly competitive technological industries, the development of alternatives to the carbon microphone (the transducer used in telephones), happened at relatively the same time from multiple places.
Please note: we will cover the evolution of the microphone in much greater depth in another thread.
The Carbon microphone (or button mike) was invented in 1876 by Emile Berliner a week before Edison, but unfortunately is next to useless to record music with, as it has a terrible signal to noise ratio and woeful frequency range. So as mentioned in part 24, bands would have to crowd together to play before a large recording horn, the loudest instruments were put at the back and the quietest in front.
I always though microphone was a silly name, look they don't resemble small telephones at all!
Although the idea of a condenser mike had been around since the early days of the telephone, it’s very low output made it also next to useless, but thanks to the invention of the vacuum tube amplifier, the problems of output and high impedance were no longer a problem as the sound could be amplified and then sent to drive an electromagnetic recording head. Suddenly the frequency range that could be recorded grew substantially as did the level of volume that could be played back.
Bands and Orchestras could sit and play in the normal positions, and the change in quality of the recording was magnitudes better.
In 1917, E.C.Wente of Bell Labs developed the first modern condenser microphone, but the early ones were problematic, it was not until the mid 20’s did these
microphones really start to shine. (or was that the the battery powered torch?)
Many competitors such as Western Electric, RCA and Neuman, also started to release condenser mikes and the refinement and evolution of these transducers continues today.
It would have pretty useless to improve the recording quality if you couldn’t hear the difference right?
The worlds 1st electronical record player.. and yes electronical IS a WORD!
Well in 1925 they did that too.
In 1925 Victor introduced it’s Victor Orthophonic Victrola, it was groundbreaking because it was specifically designed to play electrically recorded disks, without going too far into the details, it had a relatively flat frequency response equaling clearer, sharper more vibrant sounding music.
Thanks to wikipedia, here’s a quote from the front page of the New York Times after it’s first public performance.
“The audience broke into applause… John Philip Sousa [said]: ‘Gentleman [sic], that is a band. This is the first time I have ever heard music with any soul to it produced by a mechanical talking machine.’ … The new instrument is a feat of mathematics and physics. It is not the result of innumerable experiments, but was worked out on paper in advance of being built in the laboratory….”
Turntables at the time were operated by a spring driven motor, that the user would have to re-wind for each record played, but as electricity became more prevalent in the home, the clock work motor was replaced by an electric one, and the needle and diaphragm was replaced by a pick up, this was usually a stylus made from steel or sapphire that was attached to a transducer that would then convert the sound to an electric signal. The playing (exponential) horn, was replaced with an amplifier and loud speaker.
In 1927: The Automatic Music Instrument Co introduced a new nifty device – the jukebox .nuff said.
The Great Depression, was a time of much turbulence for most industry’s and the record industry was not spared, unlike music boxes and player pianos/piano players the record industry managed to survive, and return to thrive. Unfortunately not before their were plenty of casualties, with many phonographic and gramophone companies merging or going out of business.
The industry pretty much ground to halt in October of 1929, when Wall Street crashed.
People needed their money for far more important things than buying records, especially as those already with a radio were provided music and entertainment for free.
In fact due to losing massive market share against electronic recording, and elctronical playback gramophones, Edison discontinued the production of phonograph records and their players. Some versions of the story state that Edison who was 82 years old at the time did this the day before the Crash!
To give you an idea just how badly the industry was hit, in 1927, 987,000 machines were produced and 104,000,000 records were sold. In 1932 those numbers dropped to 40,000 and 6,000,000 respectively.
A much older, but much more comfortable looking Edison, By this time he had invented a chair with 4 legs.
In order to try and raise sales in the 30’s record companies started to market collections of music based on 1 genre or performer, these albums of records were specially designed and usually had artwork on the front and liner notes on the back and/or the inside. Most of these albums consisted of 3 or 4 records with each disk having a song on each side. In 1948, when12inch Long Players (LP) started to be released they normally had the same amount of tracks on the 1 disc as the 78rpm albums used to, this is why an LP has come to be known as an album.
The record industry may have survived the Depression, but it’s father Thomas Edison didn’t, he died at the age of 84 in 1931.
And on this rather final note we’ll end our current chapter on the phonograph.
The Phonograph was dead and so was it’s creator. But the gramophone was still alive and in place to become the dominant musical influence of the 20th century.
More will be revealed next in Chapter 4 of our series on the history of the record player. CLICK HERE.
CLICK HERE for the previous chapter
CLICK HERE for the INDEX of History Of Electronic Music
Posted by Angelika in THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC Sunday, 10 January 2010 12:42 No Comments
Part 24. How A Business Machine And A Child’s Toy met In The Middle.
The History of the Phonograph. Chapter 2
In the last episode we found out about the invention of the first ever, audio recording device, and Thomas Edison’s creation the Phonograph, that started an r-evolution that would change the world.
Today we continue our story looking at an invention that became the humble record player we know and love today.
In 1886, Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell invented a device that used wax coated cylinders that were engraved using a vertical method that became known as hill and dale. Their device was named the Graphophone.
Emile's wife was going to kill him when she realized he chopped up the garden hose..
In 1887, Emile Berliner, a German born American came up with a method of using a lateral stylus movement that imprinted it’s vibrations as it moved in a spiral along a zinc disc.
He named this invention the Gramophone. (any one watch the Grammy’s??)
Looking at early patents from Edison, it’s clear that he also considered the idea of recording sound as a spiral on disc, but as the velocity and pressure of the stylus is greater the closer to the middle the disc, he opted to go for the more “scientifically correct” cylinder where the velocity and pressure remain constant.
It’s interesting to note, that Edison didn’t see the phonograph’s primary use as a music player, and initially wasn’t marketed in this way at all.
In a suggested list of it’s 10 most useful applications, Edison listed 8 of them based around the voice for educational, business and archival purposes, only 2 refer to music reproduction including music-boxes and toys. (and none of them refer to using them as placemats in cafes??!)
Despite Edison’s intentions for the Phonograph to become a business machine, by 1889, something of a commercial recording industry had started up. The first phonographic parlor was opened in San Francisco, here customers would select which songs to listen to on their hired phonograph salon.
Initially musicians would have to record into several phonographs at once and keep repeating the performance until enough copies were created to satisfy the demand.The recordings were all made acoustically, the music was recorded through a horn that led to the recording diaphragm.
Both the frequency range and the sensitivity was of low quality, and wax was a poor medium for capturing music.
Singer’s would almost have to put their face into the recording horn, apparently standard violins were barely usable, but Cello’s and double bases were completely un-recordable.
But despite all this, the novelty value of hearing music jump off a cylinder or disc was immense. The start of the century saw the industry start to pick up speed.
Canned music!
Phonograph cylinders were sold in cardboard tubes, with cardboard lids at each end. These tubes were used to protect the recordings. These containers and the shape of the cylinders (together with the “tinny” sound of early records compared to live music) prompted bandleader John Phillip Sousa to famously make fun of the records as canned music. But he did still record on them.
Click here to hear 1 of Sousa’s recordings.
Berliner’s invention of the gramophone gave the industry a much-needed boost, he also invented a method of creating a matrix (or master disc) that could be used to duplicate almost unlimited copies.
Despite that fact that his first commercial applications were for toys, he quickly realized the gramophones’ musical potential and hired famous musicians to be recorded to promote his discs.
The maximum available duration had a big impact on music of the time.
By the beginning of the 20th century both cylinder s and the early discs played for 2 minutes.
In 1903 Victor released a 12 inch disc that could record a whopping 3 minutes 30 seconds! This had a massive influence on the duration of commercial music, and to a very large degree is where we get the short radio friendly edits of pop songs today.
Here’s a clip of Jene Bailey’s Orchestra playing “All Aboard For Heaven” c. April 1925 it’s played from a restored 1901 Zon- O-
Phone “Home” disc phonograph or Gramophone.
That’s not to say that longer tracks were not recorded. One of the workarounds to this problem was to release sets of records. The first multi-record release happened in 1903. HMV England released the very first complete recording of an Opera, Verdi’s ‘Erani’ and it came in a tidy little package of 40 single sided discs!
The Famous His Masters Voice Dog, He'd be 23,000 years old now in dog years.
In America at the start of 1900, there were 2 leading flat disc manufactures that were far bigger than the rest, Columbia whose discs were played at 80 rpm and Victor whose discs played at a speed of 76rpm. The fact that both companies’ discs could be played on each others respective players meant that eventually the speeds met in the middle and 78rpm became the standard for the fist few decades.
So the phonograph and the gramophone had grown up a little, starting as a business machine and a children’s toy respectively, people were starting to enjoy them both as a way of connecting to music. And remember this is all before electricity was used in households!
The next 30 years saw many changes as the industry matured into something the world had never seen before.
Find out what in part 25 CLICK HERE.
CLICK HERE for the previous chapter
CLICK HERE for the INDEX of History Of Electronic Music
Posted by Angelika in THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC Tuesday, 5 January 2010 15:32 No Comments
Part 23. In The Beginning there was soot…
The History of the Phonograph. Chapter 1.
In 2008 something incredible happened in the history of sound.
It was rewritten.
Up until 2 years ago, it was common belief that Thomas Edison was the first person to record sound that was capable of play back.
That was until modern technology “caught up” to the world’s first sound recorder.
The Phonoautograph, you speak in that thingy there and turn that whatsit over there, and then call for help because you ruined it. -image courtesy of firstsounds.org-
In 1855 Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville ,a French printer and bookseller from Paris created the device he called the Phonoautograph. It Consisted of a mouthpiece horn and membrane that was attached to a stylus which recorded the fluctuations of sound on a rotating cylinder that was wrapped in smoke blackened paper. (phew that sentence was almost as long as Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville’s name!)
Unfortunately he wasn’t able to devise a way to play back the sound recorded, (which to my way of thinking is the equivalent of eating some funny mushrooms and then writing down the secret to the universe then afterward not being able to read what what you wrote.)
As a result the phonoautograph was manufactured and sold as a laboratory instrument for analyzing sound. (and the secret to the universe will stay in my 2nd drawer neatly folded until the chosen one with magical reading skills come along).
Just over 150 years later Scientists at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in California analyzed a cylinder that Martinville recorded back in 1860. Incredibly, they managing to playback a ten second recording of the French folksong Au Clair de la Lune.
To hear the earliest known recorded sound that was trapped in charcoal for 148 years watch the above youtube clip, or click here. This is will take you to the home site of the firstsounds.org project.
NOTE: for those wondering. It categorically does not say “Help me! The evil Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville has trapped me in soot for nearly 150 years!”
Because that would just be silly.
Another Frenchman, scientist Charles Cros, conceptualised the phonograph, but was unable to create a working model.
By the time Cros’ theory was made public, Thomas Edison had created a working phonograph.
Thus both Edison and Charles Cross are recognized with independent discoveries of the phonograph. ( A good fact to remember for the pub trivia).
This phonograph was made a long time ago but photographed recently, we know this because it's in c-o-l-o-u-r!
In 1877 Thomas Edison was working on 2 other inventions, the telephone and the telegraph.
While trying to create a machine that would write telegraphic messages, a “telegraph repeater,” which would “record Morse code signals by indenting dots and dashes on a paper tape,” , he noticed that the tape of the machine gave off a noise similar to words. Speculating on this, Edison designed a device with the intention to be able to record a telephone message.
At first he used a stretched taught diaphragm attached to an embossing needle that was passed rapidly against paraffin paper, later he refined his design by swapping the paper for a tinfoil wrapped cylinder. It had 2 needles, 1 for writing on to the cylinder and 1 for playing it back, which was achieved by swapping the mouthpiece for a “reproducer” which had a more sensitive diaphragm.
Edison gave this design to his head lab mechanic, John Kreusi, legend has it that Kreusi built it in 30 hours!
On getting his hands on the machine, Edison tested it out immediately by reciting the nursery rhyme “mary had a little lamb”.
Despite expecting some success, he was amazed when the machine spoke his words back to him in a small tinny voice.
.
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Edison organized a presentation with his good friend, the editor of the Scientific America
“Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night.”Need less to say the folks witnessing were impressed, the following quote is from the same article as quoted above found in the Scientific American Nov.17, 1877.
“It has been said that Science is never sensational; that it is intellectual, not emotional; but certainly nothing that can be conceived would be more likely to create the profoundest of sensations, to arouse the liveliest of human emotions, than once more to hear the familiar voices of the dead. Yet Science now announces that this is possible, and can be done…. Speech has become, as it were, immortal.”My favorite of all the recordings can be found in the creative commons it’s of an after dinner Speech at the “Little Menlo” in London.
George Gouraud had come to London to demonstrate Edison’s “Perfected” Phonograph. Gouraud demonstrated the phonograph to various celebrities in a series of Phonograph Parties in the autumn of 1888 and made recordings of their reactions as messages for delivery to Thomas Edison. Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) was one of these guests, and it is his speech to Edison that appears here.
Transcription:
| “ | George Gouraud:
Arthur Sullivan:
-Arthur Sullivan
|
I just love the line that Edmund Yates has his lucid intervals..
You can listen for yourself by clicking on this link Arthur_Sullivan_-_wax_cylinder_recording
Edison may have been the bad boy of the inventer gang, but his 3 legged chair sucked.
Even though interest was great, it would be another 20 years before the world would really take to this world changing invention.
And it truly was, Edison had discovered the fundamental nature of sound.
Sound at it’s simplest description are fluctuations in air pressure.
The effect of vibration (waves) as they are reflected and captured by the minute diaphragm that vibrates in our ear in response.
This means that every sound has it’s own vibrational signature, by speaking into Edison’s Phonograph, the diaphragm vibrates in response to the vibrations of your voice, which is then embossed on the tin foil, playback was basically achieved by reversing the process.
This remains the fundamental method of all analog recording and playback we use today.
(which to me is the equivalant of eating normal mushrooms and writing down the secret to the universe and then everyone being able to read and understand it!)
What happens next? Does Edison’s Phonograph fall into the wrong hands? Does Edouard-of-the-long-french-name succeed in capturing anyone else using just tinfoil and a rubber band?
CLICK HERE FOR PART 24 THE NEXT EXCITING INSTALLMENT INTO THE HISTORY OF THE PHONOGRAPH.
CLICK HERE for the INDEX of History Of Electronic Music