Toggle navigation
Juan Monroy
Curriculum Vitae
Courses
Elements of Film Style
Connect
Personal
Queens College
LaGuardia CC
Pratt Institute
Office Hours (CUNY)
Office Hours (Pratt)
Personal Site
Courses Blog
Pay Me with Square Cash
Pay Me with PayPal
Pinboard
Instapaper
Flickr
Instagram
Ride with GPS
YouTube
Vimeo
Student Association of Cinema Studies at NYU
Robots Softball
History of Film
Media Criticism
History of Broadcasting
Film and New York City
Home
Courses
Media Technologies
Week 11, Sound Recording
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