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Looking at it this way, one can say that storage is really only a delay, which may be quite long. This was an absolute truth in the days when it was only possible to record live sound and before mixing and editing became essential in record production.
All imaginable types of analog storage were contemplated and tried over the last century but only one became com- mercial in the sense of “widespread.” That was the mechani- cal record that relies on modifying the surface structure of a record.
In the very early days of analog recording, storage was en- tirely dependent on converting the vibrations of the dia- phragm directly into a displacement of the surface of a stor- age medium, a record. Later, it was found that it was possible to use a microphone and an amplifier to transfer the electri- cal signal from the microphone into its physical form on a storage medium. This required further transducers, both to read into the storage medium and to pick the signal off when the recording was played. Today, we only need the input and the output because everything else is fully electronic and digitally coded.
The First Implementation of Ideas
for Recording Sounds for Later Analysis, 1857
From merely considering sound as something that was per- ceived by the ear was in itself a major paradigm shift when it was realized that the sound was related to vibration and that some vibrations caused pressure variations in the air around the barometric mean (Beyer, 1999). Furthermore, it was dis- covered that a diaphragm would vibrate when it was hit by a sound.
Graphic observation of sound pressure variations came into the scientific world with Léon Scott of Paris, France, who developed his phonautograph in 1857. In essence, it was a sound collector with a diaphragm and a scriber combined with a kymograph (Brock-Nannestad, 2014). The famous physical instrument manufacturer Rudolph Koenig (Panta- lony, 2009) manufactured Scott’s invention from 1859 under a patent license (Brock-Nannestad, 2007), and it remained in his and his successors’ catalogues until about 1920. Scott and Koenig had different views on the phonautograph’s use; Koenig wanted to observe harmonics in complex sounds, storing the results and demonstrating physical relationships, whereas Scott wished to characterize the patterns of speech.
Their problematic relationship was acerbated by Scott’s fail- ure to renew his patent (Brock-Nannestad and Fontaine, 2008).
The First Implementation of Ideas for Retrieving a Sound from a Recording, 1877
Charles Cros, a French poet and inventor, considered that it might be possible to use the undulating tracings from a phonautograph in connection with photoengraving to etch grooves in a surface. Such a groove could make a needle vi- brate when it was pulled along the groove, and the vibrations would correspond to the waveshape of the original sound. He did not demonstrate his process in practice.
At the same time, Thomas Alva Edison in the United States was experimenting with recording the actual excursions of a diaphragm that received sound, and he demonstrated re- produced sound from a cylindrical surface that had been deformed by the receiving diaphragm via a stylus in an en- semble called a “soundbox.” He used a second soundbox with a reproducing stylus and diaphragm and was able to obtain recognizable sound. In other words, sound record- ing technology started with the diaphragm doing real work! This was the basis for vertical or “hill-and-dale” recording, but Edison did not develop his principle further at the time.
This initiative was taken at the Volta Laboratory in Wash- ington, DC, by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Taint- er, who devised a wax substance that could be cut into by a lathe-type machine tool and subsequently replayed and even shaved to obtain a new fresh recording surface. A horn or funnel collected the sound and led it to a capsule with a diaphragm that drove a cutting stylus. The Volta Laboratory development eventually led to the establishment of the Co- lumbia Graphophone Co., and their main competitor in the cylinder field became Edison after his company reentered the field. The first intended use was for dictation, but later the idea of “canned music” (John Philip Sousa’s derogatory term) was developed into the recording industry.
Business Sense:
Both Hardware and Software
In the beginning, record companies had two products: pho- nographs and the records for them. It is difficult to distin- guish which one was the most important. The wish of the companies was that their records sounded good on their own machines. The records had to resemble the original art-
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