| 1796 | The Music Box was invented in Geneva by the watchmaker A. Favre. |
| 1800 | The Barrel Organ was invented by Barberi. It was used as a musical accompaniment for wandering musicians. |
| 1877 | The Phonograph was invented by Thomas Edison on Aug. 12. It mechanically modeled sound waves on a wax cylinder, the quality was poor, the cylinders didn't last and they couldn't be copied. Edison viewed it as a tool for business and only grudgingly recorded a few music cylinders before losing interest. |
| 1877 | The Loudspeaker. The first patent went to Ernst Wermer of Siemens, Germany, on Dec. 14, 1877; the second to Sir Oliver Lodge of the UK on April 27, 1898. Unfortunately for both, music had yet to be converted into the electrical signals that would allow a speaker to work. |
| 1886 | The Graphophone was invented by Charles Sumner Tainter and Chinchester Bell (cousin of Alexander); it was a variation on Edison's cylinder. |
| 1887 | The Player Piano was invented in the US. This instrument represented the highest quality of sound reproduction possible for many years. Not only did it accurately reproduce piano sounds - since It was a piano - but it also conveyed the exact nuances of the musician who recorded the initial piano roll. A famous pianist could record a single roll that could be copied many times; these copies found their way into parlors and (particularly) saloons across the country. Player pianos were the true forerunners of the jukebox. |
| 1887 | Both the Gramophone and the gramophone Record were invented by Emile Berliner, a German living in the US. Originally the Gramophone used circular discs of zinc with a wax coating; eventually more durable substances were found, making possible the mass reproduction from a master disc by 1888. In 189?, Berliner returned to Germany and founded Deutsche Gramnzaphon Gesellschaft, one of the world's great record companies. For a few years afterward the cylinder and the record coexisted.- but Berliner's invention had made Edison's finally obsolete. |
| 1889 | The Jukebox was invented by Louis Glas. It initially used the cylinders and never became popular until the 1950's when the 45 RPM record appeared. |
| 1898 | The first Tape Recorder (which had been worked out theoretically by Englishman Oberlin Smith in 1888) was put together by the Dane Valdemar Poulsen using residual magnetization in a steel wire. All electro-magnetic recorders used wire or steel tape to record their signals, limiting their utility. Fidelity was poor and awaited further developments. |
| 1901 | The Photographic Recording of sound was devised by either Ruhmer of Germany or Duddel of England, perhaps by both simultaneously. Their technique involved making a picture of the "singing arc" phenomenon first noticed in 1882. Lithotographic recording was the standard for all talking motion pictures right up into the 1970's, when George Lucas' Star Wars brought modern audio reproduction into theatres. |
| 1924 | Chester W. Rice and Edward W. Kellogg, both of GE labs, invented the first usable Dynamic Loudipeaker, which they coupled with a primitive (and revolutionary) one-watt amplifier. It was sold as the "Radiola Model 104" for $250, a very large sum at the time. 1925 The Microphone was invented at Bell Labs under direction of Joseph Maxfield, and electrical recording was on its way. The first commercial recording produced by electrical engineering appeared the same year. Within a very short time a new type of singer -'The Crooner - had appeared, with a style based on the intimate phrasing possible only with the microphone. |
| 1925 | It's difficult to believe, but Pulse Code Modulation - the basis of digitized audio - was completely worked out by Paul M. Ramey at this early date. Everything was there: sampling, quantification, and code. This ground-breaking work was then apparently forgotten! The idea was re-invented in 1939 by A.H. Reeves, forgotten again, and finally resurrected during WWII by Bell Labs during research into methods of encoding phone conversations. |
| 1930 | The Electronic Organ was invented by the Frenchmen Coupleux and Givelet: the first electronic musical instrument. |
| 1933 | Stereo Records were invented by Western Electric and Bell Labs during research on sound movies. Labs had developed a "gold-sputtering" technique for stereo master discs in 1931, and by 1933 the first hi-fi stereo demonstration record appeared featuring Leopold gtokowski and Philadelphia Orchestra. In the same year, Stereo 78's were developed by EMI in England. Stereo remained experimental until 1958, at which time the first commercial stereo records appeared in the US on Audio Fidelity, and on Decca & Pye in the UK. |
| 1935 | The first usable Magnetic Recording Tape was devised by BASF in Germany. In 1928 Fritz Pfleurr. had covered a strip ofpaper with magnetized steel particles, but failed to produce a workable recording format because the paper was not strong enough to survive recording and playback. He interested the industrial giant AEG in the process; they turned it over to BASF, where chemists suggested replacing paper with strips of cellulose-acetylene (invented in 1932). AEG then developed a plastic-tape device called the "magnetophon" ; it ran at 7.6 meters per second. Tape recording was born, and both AEG and BASF prospered through their close ties with the Nazis. |
| 1936 | The First Public Recording with a Tape Recorder was made on Nov. 19 at the BASF factory in Ludwigshafen. It featured the visiting London Philharmonic. |
| 1940 | Tape recorders were first premagnetized in 1921 by US Navy officers W.L. Carpenter and G.W. Carpenter. They were unaware of the potential usefulness of pre-magnetization, however, and once again the Germans led the way. In 1940 radio broadcasting technicians J. von Braunmuhl and Dr. W. Weber figured out that a pure high-frequency current (e.g. 100KHz) added to to the musical information would decrease distortion and increase the dynamic level. This technique is still in use today and is known as the bias signal. |
| 1947 | The LP was invented by Peter Goldenmark for CBS, and the 78 was suddenly obsolete. The LP, with its 100 grooves per centimeter (36 on a 78), featured over twice the playing time coupled with an
increase in the quality of the sound. (The situation has been paralleled in our times by the revolutionary
impact of the CD.) The first LP recordings were Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, Tschaikowsky's Fourth Symphony, and South Pacific, Taking their cue from German audio pioneers, CBS paid Goldenmark no royalties for his idea. was, however, given one copy of every LP CBS produced. |
| 1958 | Box-enclosed Loudspeakers were invented by the French firm Cabesse. They were packaged with a built-in amplifier. The enclosed loudspeaker remains the typical speaker technology. |
| 1963 | The first audio Cassette was devised by the European audio giant Phillips. |
| 1965 | The Rhythm Box was invented by Wurlitzer for use with their Electronic organs, though electronic percussion per se was first patented by the English company Simmons in 1980. |
| 1965 | The Synthesizer was invented by Robert Moog. Synthesizer technology developed rapidly, the pull was insatiable for the new sounds, and now virtually all popular Music is recorded either wholly or partially with electronic synthesis and sampling. |
| 1967 | The Dolby Noise Reduction process was invented by the American Ray Dolby. Noise reduction provided a significant improvement in the signal to noise ratio of taped material, and cassettes were finaly listenable. |
| 1979 | The Compact Disc was invented by Phillips in the Netherla-nds and by Sony in Japan. The CD has the potential to reproduce sound at a higher fidelity than the human ear can distinguish. The breakthrough came when the numerical sampling first sketched out in 1926 was made practical with laser scans and number-crunching electronic memory. The CD player reads 4 million pieces of audio information per second off a disc 12 centimeters in diameter. |
| 1979 | The Walkman was conceptualized by Akio Morita, president of Sony. For the first time, high-quality audio became miniature and completely portable. New developments continue to shrink the size of it's components. |
| 1981 | The Synthetic Music Box was invented by the Englishman Linn. The principles of numerical synthesis were applied to an instrument. |
Hard Disk Recording became commonplace as the computer grew to dominate high-end audio. Once an audio wave has been entirely digitized, the computer's uniquely random access to the data and wholly numeric environment allows for editing procedures and types of signal processing previously impossible.
Sampling is a form of hard disk recording optimized for playback and triggered by MIDI devices. The Digital Compact Cassette and the Mini Disc are just the two latest attempts to sell digital technology to a mass audience. Both are significant in that they make no attempt to capture the entire audio waveform, instead relying on psycho-acoustic masking techniques that allow any frequency not perceived by the humal ear (or brain) to be discarded.
MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), a communications standard developed so that electronic instruments might communicate with each other, ushered in a fast-moving technology that allows compute: control of a daunting range of synthesizer parameters. Virtually any aspect of musical expression can be manipulated and used as a compositional tool. Daily improvements in the sound quality of the synthesizer environment suggest an unending stream of new sounds, and previously unimagined ways to simulate old ones
The stylus, mounted in the cartridge, follows the molded contours of the record. These contours are a representation, or analog, of-the shape ofthe energy waves that make up sounds.
The pickup converts the movement of the stylus - imparted to it by the groove - into corresponding electrical signals in the form of an alternating voltage.
In a magnetic pickup (the cartrid&e most commonly used today) the electrical output is due to the relative motion of a magnetic field and a coil (or two coils in the case of a stereophonic pickup) located in the field.
The movable system in the pickup must be mounted so that the stylus can follow every rapid change ofdirection of the groove virtually without resistance. For the same reason the mass of all the moving parts must be as small as possible. Modern pickups combining high resilience with small moving mass so greatly reduce distortion and groove wear that deterioration of records due to repeated use has been virtually eliminated.
The stylus must have a rounded tip suited to the cross-sectional dimensions of the groove, so as to insure that the tip is maintained in contact with the sloping side walls of the groove and clears the bottom. The wavy pattern of the groove determines the frequency and amplitude of the sound vibration; these correspond respectively to the pitch and loudness of the sound.
On playing back the disc in a gramophone (at the same speed as the recording speed) the wave pattern the groove will produce corresponding vibrations in the reproducing stylus, and these mechanical vibrations can be either directly (by means of a diaphragm, as in early phonographs or gramophones) or indirectly (through a process of electronic amplification) be reproduced as audible vibrations in the air.
Stereophonic reproduction is accomplished by means of a single stylus with its axes of movement inclined at 45 degrees to the record surface, the pickup being designed to produce two independent signals in accordance with the motion components along two (90 degree displaced) axes. The two signals are amplified and sent to two separate loudspeakers.
The Tape Recorder:
In early tape recorders, steel wire and tape was used, but nowadays a plastic tape provided with a coating of metallic particles is the standard. (see Table below). These particles, which are applied to the tape in a coating mixed with a binder substance, are strongly magnetizable and retain their magnetic properties almost indefinitely. During both recording and playback, the tape is passed across the heads.
A recording head consists of a coil of wire wound around a core of magnetic iron which has a gap at the point where the tape moves across the surface. The tape is precisely aligned with the gap. The current in the coil magnetizes the particles in the tape; during playback, the process is reversed. The sound, which has be converted by a microphone into an electrical signal, controls this magnetization. The sound ultimately produces variations in the strength of the magnetic field recorded on the tape; these variations are a representation, or analog, of the sound wave that is equivalent to the grooves on a record.
Standard Tape Formulations:
Open-reel analog (1/4" to 2"): Ferric (iron)
Compact cassette (analog): Ferric, chrome (chromium dioxide or modified ferric), metal particle
Open-reel digital (1/4" to 2"): Cobalt modified ferric
DAT cassette: Metal Particle
Digital Recording:
Digital recording, like LPs and tape, creates a representation of the sound that can be electrically manipulated and stored. Unlike the analog methods, however, digital does not create a linear model of the audio wave. Instead, digital sound gives precise numeric information in a complex code; these numbers, if there are enough of them, tell exactly what the sound wave is doing at every nanosecond of its existence. The sound waves are plotted like the course of a ship across the Atlantic; every few millionths of a second, the latitude and longitude are entered in the log. This information can then be retained in a variety of formats: Digital Audio Tape, a computer's hard disk, a Compact Disk. It can be transmitted in its digital form down an optical fiber. It can be manipulated: it can be cut, pasted, copied indefinitely; it can be combined with many other digital signals, sent thousands of miles, and then retrieved without distortion.
Digital taping uses a special metal-particle tape formulation to handle the extreme density of the data It records a pulse-code modulated signal that is similar to a video signal in many respects. There's a tiny rotating head (or heads), a mechanism to pull the tape out of the cassette for recording and playback (which slows down mode-to-mode transport changes compared to conventional tape); the tape is very slow-moving (about 0.33 inches per second); and the signal is frequency modulated. The input stage features a low-pass "anti-aliasing" filter, a sample-and-hold circuit, and the crucial analog-to-digital converter. The deck is only as good as its sampling frequency, quantization scheme, and input filter characteristics. Thw DAT standard calls for 16-bit, linear quantization, the same as a CD. This allows for over 65,536 different signal levels to be resolved, resulting in a dynamic range of well over 90 db.