It’s amazing to think that music has only been recorded for the last 150 years. Before that, people simply wrote down the notes on paper. If you wanted to listen to a song, you either had to play it yourself or go to a concert. But since then, gramophones have been invented, recording studios have been used and now, we can listen to our favorite songs on a plethora of devices. Let’s explore the history of how music has been recorded throughout the years.
Recorded music can trace its origins to a very specific year, 1877. This is when Thomas Edison came up with the radical idea of the phonograph. This machine was made up of a piece of tinfoil that circumvented a cylindrical drum. This would rotate laterally when turned by a handle.
Vibrations would be caused by the sound waves focused on the diaphragm. At the same time, the stylus would adjust pressure onto the tin foil. Then, a groove would be embedded in tin foil as a result of the drum rotating and moving across the stylus.
The First Gramophone
Emil Burner produced the first gramophone, developed between 1887 and 1893. The stylus could now move across the recording medium, which was a disc rather than a cylinder.
At the end of the First World War, record companies had to find a way to develop the gramophone further, as the sound quality from the microphones and loudspeaker were far superior. HMV established an experimental setting in 1924, wherein microphones would be used for recording, replacing the horn.
Bell Telephone Laboratories engineers Maxwell and Harrison had developed high-quality public address systems in the 1920s. They turned their attention to sound recording. For the first time, each element of the recording process, from acoustics, to the sound source, to the playing machine, were all subject to heavy scientific research.
The results of their work changed the very concept of an acoustic studio recording completely, forming the basis for what we know today as a “studio recording.”