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- Media Technologies: 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
- 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
- John Philip Sousa
- marches
- head conductor of US Marine Band, 1880–1892
- composed some of the most famous marches in US
- “Menace of Mechanical Music,” opposed recording music
- Sound Waves
- waveform
- x-axis: wavelength
- y-axis: amplitude
- frequency
- cycle per second
- Hertz (Hz)
- Phonautographe
- Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, 1857
- recorded with hog’s hair bristle and a funnel
- recorded on lamp-blacked glass plates
- “Au Claire de la lune” (1860)
- Phonograph
- Thomas Edison, 1877
- black foil cylinders
- playback by repositioning the needle on the surface
- marketed as an office-talking machine
- Graphophone
- Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter, 1886
- office-talking machine
- wax cylinder
- complement the telephone
- Popular Music is Popular
- molded phonograph records
- pre-recorded music on cylinders
- popular but difficult to mass produce
- cylinders were not very durable
- Berliner’s Gramophone (1887)
- Emile Berliner, 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)
- Victor Talking Machine Company
- record player inside a piece of furniture
- crank operated (1906)
- electrically operated (1925)
- an essential consumer goods by the 1920s
- Gramophone Records
- standard
- 3 minutes of music on each side
- made of shellac until WWII
- made from polyvinyl
- more durable
- better sound fidelity
- Long Playing Records
- CBS, 1948
- 20 minutes of music on each side
- multisong albums
- longer classical music recordings
- 45-rpm single
- RCA, 1949
- quarter-hole size for jukeboxes
- invigorated market for sales of songs heard on jukeboxes
- Format War
- incompatible formats
- center hole
- playing speed
- Format Truce
- LP became standard for long-playing albums
- 45s became standard for singles
- record players were designed to play both formats
- Magnetic Tape
- patented in 1886, by Bell and Tainter
- developed in 1930s
- reel to reel
- too much tape required to make a recording
- tape would break easily due to brittleness
- AGFA
- plastic magnetic tape
- more durable
- sound editing
- multitrack mixing
- Multitrack Recording
- Figure 1: tape transport
- Figure 2: tape tracks
- record on one track
- overlay recording on an adjacent track
- playback mixes tracks together
- stereophonic sound
- Alan Blumlein, 1958
- recorded many different instruments
- mixed down to two, stereo tracks
- quadrophonic sound (1971)
- introduced 1971
- four-track sound
- did not catch on commercially
- Cassette Tape
- magnetic tape stored in a cassette, 1960s
- portability of music
- small size
- long playing times
- Sony Walkman, 1980s
- Home Taping
- home dubbing
- Recording Industry Association of—and others—opposed it
- Digital Recording
- Thomas Stockham, digital recorder, 1967
- analog vs. digital
- sonic fluctuations
- encoded into binary code
- processed by computer (ADC)
- Optical Disk
- a polycarbonate disc layer has the data encoded by using lands and pits.
- a reflective layer reflects the laser back.
- a lacquer layer is used to prevent oxidation
- artwork is screen printed on the top of the disc.
- a laser beam reads the polycarbonate disc, is reflected back, and read by the player.
- Compact Disc
- Philips and Sony
- lower cost than vinyl
- debuted in 1983
- surpassed LP sales in 1987
- Compression
- reducing data file size
- discard bits
- reproduction is “good enough”