Juan Monroy — Media Technologies: Class 10, Sound Recording

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1 Steinway Piano
- 1.1 middle-class consumer device
- 1.2 made in Astoria, Queens
- 1.3 remains leading manufacturer of pianos
2 Sheet music
- 2.1 music meets consumerism
- 2.2 similar to “singles”
- 2.3 printed with illustrated covers
- 2.4 two entities
  - publishers
  - composers
3 Tin Pan Alley
- 3.1 West 28th Street in New York
- 3.2 row of music publishers
  - they were like book publishers
  - main product was print
- 3.3 clattering of “tin pans”
  - aspiring composers
  - pitching their songs
4 Composers
- 4.1 Scott Joplin
  - rags
  - “Maple Leaf Rag”
  - “The Entertainer”
- 4.2 John Philip Sousa
  - head conductor of US Marine Band, 1880–1892
  - composed some of the most famous marches in US
    - “Stars and Stripes Forever”
    - “Semper Fidelis”
  - opposed recording music
5 Eduouard-Leon Scott de Martinville
- 5.1 hog’s hair bristle and a funnel
- 5.2 scratched the liquid surface (lamp black)
- 5.3 Oldest recording of a human voice: Au clair de la lune (1860)
6 Thomas Edison (1877)
- 6.1 black foil cylinders
- 6.2 playback by repositioning the needle on the surface
7 Office Recording Machines
- 7.1 Edison’s phonograph (1877)
  - patent for a type of answering machine
- 7.2 Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter’s graphophone (1886)
  - wax cylinder
  - complement the telephone
8 Popular Music is Popular
- 8.1 pre-recorded music on cylinders
- 8.2 popular but difficult to mass produce
- 8.3 cylinders were not very durable
9 Berliner’s Gramophone (1887)
- 9.1 flat round disks
- 9.2 zinc, coated with beeswax
- 9.3 played on a turntable
- 9.4 disks can be mass produced by pressing
- 9.5 stamped with labels to differentiate title, performer, composer
10 Victor Talking Machine Company
- 10.1 Victrola (1906)
  - record player inside a piece of furniture
  - crank operated (1906)
  - electrically operated (1925)
- 10.2 an essential consumer goods by the 1920s
11 Phonographs
- 11.1 10-inch, 78 rpm record became the standard
- 11.2 sales hurt by radio and the Great Depression
- 11.3 made of shellac until WWII
- 11.4 made from polyvinyl
  - more durable
  - better sound fidelity
12 RCA vs. CBS format war
- 12.1 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
- 12.2 RCA developed a competing 45-rpm (1949)
  - quarter-sized hole for jukeboxes
  - invigorated market for sales of songs heard on jukeboxes
- 12.3 incompatible formats
- 12.4 truce reached in 1953
  - LP became standard for long-playing albums
  - 45s became standard for singles
  - record players were designed to play both formats
13 magnetic tape
- 13.1 developed in the 1930s
  - reel to reel
  - too much tape required to make a recording
  - tape would break easily due to brittleness
- 13.2 AGFA (German company) during WWII years used plastic magnetic tapes
  - more durable
  - sound editing
  - multitrack mixing
14 multichannel sound
- 14.1 stereophonic sound (1931)
  - Alan Blumlein
  - commercially available in 1958
  - recorded many different instruments which were mixed down to two, stereo tracks
- 14.2 quadrophonic sound (1971)
  - four-track sound
  - did not catch on commercially
15 Cassette Tapes (1960s)
- 15.1 Portability of music
- 15.2 Home dubbing: copy music from records or radio
- 15.3 Sony Walkman
16 digital recording
- 16.1 Thomas Stockham, digital recorder in 1967
- 16.2 analog vs. digital
  - fluctuations
  - encoded into binary
- 16.3 compact discs
  - Philips and Sony
  - lower cost than vinyl
  - debuted in 1983
  - surpassed LP sales in 1987