Juan Monroy — Week 11, Sound Recording

Steinway Piano
- middle-class consumer device
- made in Astoria, Queens
- remains leading manufacturer of pianos
Sheet music
- music meets consumerism
- similar to “singles”
- printed with illustrated covers
- two entities
  - publishers
  - composers
Tin Pan Alley
- West 28th Street in New York
- row of music publishers
  - they were like book publishers
  - main product was print
- clattering of “tin pans”
  - aspiring composers
  - pitching their songs
Composers
- Scott Joplin
  - rags
- John Philip Sousa
  - head conductor of US Marine Band, 1880–1892
  - composed some of the most famous marches in US
  - opposed recording music
Eduouard-Leon Scott de Martinville
- hog’s hair bristle and a funnel
- scratched the liquid surface (lamp black)
- Oldest recording of a human voice: Au clair de la
  lune (1860)
Thomas Edison (1877)
- black foil cylinders
- playback by repositioning the needle on the surface
Office Recording Machines
- Edison’s phonograph (1877)
  - patent for a type of answering machine
- Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter’s graphophone (1886)
  - wax cylinder
  - complement the telephone
Popular Music is Popular
- pre-recorded music on cylinders
- popular but difficult to mass produce
- cylinders were not very durable
Berliner’s Gramophone (1887)
- flat round disks
- zinc, coated with beeswax
- played on a turntable
- disks can be mass produced by pressing
- stamped with labels to differentiate title, performer, composer
Victor Talking Machine Company
- Victrola (1906)
  - record player inside a piece of furniture
  - crank operated (1906)
  - electrically operated (1925)
- an essential consumer goods by the 1920s
Phonographs
- 10-inch, 78 rpm record became the standard
- sales hurt by radio and the Great Depression
- made of shellac until WWII
- made from polyvinyl
  - more durable
  - better sound fidelity
RCA vs. CBS format war
- CBS introduced 33 1/3 rpm long-playing record (1948)
  - 20 minutes of music on each side
  - created market for multisong albums and longer classical music
- RCA developed a competing 45-rpm (1949)
  - quarter-sized hole for jukeboxes
  - invigorated market for sales of songs heard on jukeboxes
- incompatible formats
- truce reached in 1953
  - LP became standard for long-playing albums
  - 45s became standard for singles
  - record players were designed to play both formats
magnetic tape
- developed in the 1930s
  - reel to reel
  - too much tape required to make a recording
  - tape would break easily due to brittleness
- AGFA (German company) during WWII years used plastic magnetic
  tapes
  - more durable
  - sound editing
  - multitrack mixing
multichannel sound
- stereophonic sound (1931)
  - Alan Blumlein
  - commercially available in 1958
  - recorded many different instruments which were mixed down to
    two, stereo tracks
- quadrophonic sound (1971)
  - four-track sound
  - did not catch on commercially
Cassette Tapes (1960s)
- Portability of music
- Home dubbing: copy music from records or radio
- Sony Walkman
digital recording
- Thomas Stockham, digital recorder in 1967
- analog vs. digital
  - fluctuations
  - encoded into binary
- compact discs
  - Philips and Sony
  - lower cost than vinyl
  - debuted in 1983
  - surpassed LP sales in 1987