No iPods, CDs, not even records. Who could imagine a world with no easy access to music?
Artwork by Ed Gloor
Music is a constantly changing art form.
Rock and Roll, Hip Hop, Rhythm and Blues, Jazz, Rap, Death Metal, Classical, and Country are only a few of the many genres of music in existence. Over the ages, music has evolved from simple human sounds like yelling and clapping to electronic synthesizers, and now even profane lyrics. Everyone is allowed to like whatever music they want to like, and that’s the beauty of it. Likewise, the way we listen to music has gone through many drastic changes, especially in the mid- to late-1900s. Records are now a thing of the past in the very large shadow of electronically downloadable music, but how has music recording evolved up to this point? The advancement of music recording and playback goes back much further than some people may think.
The first device ever created to play recorded sounds was Thomas Edison’s tin foil Phonograph. According to the About.com website, the Phonograph used round cylinders to play recorded music and sounds. However, being invented in 1877, these cylinders could only play the music once, and the sound quality of the Phonograph itself was terrible.
Alexander Graham Bell followed up the Phonograph with a similar piece of technology named the Graphophone. The Graphophone was slightly more advanced with wax cylinders that could be played multiple times. The downside to these though, was that each cylinder had to be recorded separately. This meant that each cylinder recorded could not be copied, and made the sale and production of music impossible.
A German immigrant named Emilie Berliner was the one who really began modern musical recording technology. Patented on November 8, 1887, Berliner’s Gramophone was the first to play recordings on flat disks instead of wax and foil cylinders. According to the About.com website, the first records were made of glass, then came zinc, and finally plastic. The spiral grooves etched onto the records contained the sound information, and these grooves could be copied onto blank records. This is what finally made the production and sale of music possible.
However, records did not start becoming a real trend until the early 1900s. Before people listened to records in their house, they listened to music from early forms of jukeboxes. The earliest predecessors to jukeboxes were large versions of Edison’s Phonograph with coin slots, and four large tubes to listen to the music. Developed by Louis Glass and William S. Arnold, the first machine earned over $1000 in the first six months of service. For a nickel a pop, this is quite a profit.
Once 1910 hit, the disk-playing Gramophone was the prime music player for a decade. A new arrival came in the mid-1920s in the form of public radio. This began the decline of the Gramophone market. Radio provided free music to everyone that owned one. The true Wurlitzer Jukebox owned the 1930s to 1940s, with jukeboxes everywhere from casinos, to restaurants.
The 8-track tape had some time in the 1960s, but then a music-playing format came out that really changed things for the recording music market. The Philips Company invented and released the first audiocassette in 1962, but they weren’t used for music until January 1, 1971. These cassettes could hold up to 12 songs, and had a booming business through the High-Fidelity Cassette Deck, Boombox, and the Sony Walkman.
The Walkman was a revolutionary item among adults and teens alike, allowing people to take their music anywhere they went, but it was released in 1979, and Compact Disks (CDs) were released about four years later. 1982 marked the release of the CD, holding up to 650 Mega Bites (74 minutes) of data. Two years later the Discman was released, and allowed people to now take their CDs anywhere they went. CDs were the perfect way for people to listen to music, or so we thought.
The development of the MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) began in 1987 by The Frounhofer Institute in Germany. This first MP3 Player wasn’t actually released until 1993, but nothing could compare to its capacity and sound quality. It may have been the first, but it wasn’t very successful. Apple Computer’s first iPod came out on October 23, 2001. iPods are now the ideal standard for anyone who listens to music. If one wishes to listen to a song, he or she simply downloads it for about one dollar. No music format has ever compared to this.
The history of music formats has been a very long one, with so many changes that people never could have anticipated, from the simplistic nature of Thomas Edison’s Phonograph, to the popular iPod Touch of today. It may be hard to imagine, but the way we listen to music could change again someday. Audio technology is an ever-changing system, but one thing is for sure, people will always enjoy listening to music.
