One may reasonably speculate that stone-age hunters - and possibly even their forebears - knew that cupping hands round the mouth aided long distance vocal projection or that a similarly cupped hand behind the ear enhanced the directional sensitivity of the hearing process. It is reasonable to assume that this knowledge was employed purposefully in much the same manner as other mammals utilise their directable ears. I am not aware that any creature other than homo sapiens consciously seeks to project its vocalisations using such “artificial” means.
These acts were probably largely unconscious and there is no evidence to suggest that their discovery was other than accidental. In the same way, we may reasonably assume that the adoption of, for example, the use of conch shells or animal horns as noise-makers was a result of accident rather than intent.
These are perhaps the earliest examples of purposeful use of the sound producing and modifying properties of external objects: the employment of hollow objects such as animal horns as “musical” instruments or, more likely, as an auditory communications medium, especially as alarm sounders. A horn structure cannot increase the output energy beyond that which is input to it but can aid in its directivity and, by resonance, optimise the amplitude of desired frequencies. The discovery of the principle of the wind instrument follows from this and would clearly have presented a substantial technical advance in communications since a sounded shell or horn would probably be audible over a far greater distance than would the human voice.
It is likely that, at around the time of the last Ice Age, European man first began purposefully to create objects recognisable as musical instruments: these were predominantly either wind or percussion types and, due largely to their small size and hence relatively low volume, were presumably used for ceremonial rather than communicative purposes. With regard to the “passive” quality of external acoustics, Rheingold has suggested that cave paintings may have had a role in primitive rites of passage, contributing together with fasting and intoxication in the creation of an early form of virtual reality. With this idea in mind, we may speculate with fair certainty that the unusual acoustic properties of caves and other underground environments were also used in the creation of the non-normal experiences to which initiates would be subjected. The ability to modulate, reverberate and otherwise transform vocal and other sounds seems likely to have provided an additional dimension to these experiences. Indeed there is some evidence to suggest that cave art may have often been located in areas of “unusual” acoustic properties, presumably to enhance its impact upon the viewer.
This apparent exploitation of anomalous but naturally occurring acoustic properties is not confined to caves and can also be found at a number of outdoor prehistoric sites throughout the world. Contemporary cultures at similar (and more advanced) levels have often been observed to utilise masks in ritual activities and, here again, it is not unreasonable to assume that their acoustic properties would not have gone unnoticed since, not only can a mask muffle a voice but, by suitable design, can modulate (by means of resonance) or help projection (by suitable shaping round the mouth to create a horn effect).
Many early cultures exhibit, in their archaeological remains, an awareness of and purposeful use of acoustic phenomena. The qualities of Graeco-Roman theatres are well known but there is substantial evidence to suggest that the ability purposefully to manipulate sonic quality was also well established elsewhere from an early date. A later example, the famous Mayan temple of Chichen-Itza is said to exhibit a number of exceptional acoustic qualities. These include the focussing of sounds, their reflection and transformation by rapid iteration. Certain structures impart the pitching characteristic of short delay times, rendering the spoken word into a screech whereas others permit the hearing of quiet sound at unusually great distances. Suggestions have been made to the effect that Mayan architects, renowned for their mechanical precision, were also able to design for acoustically desirable outcomes.
Given their demonstrable command of the relevant technologies, it is reasonable to assume this to be the case. The exact intent is, however, less clear with suggestions ranging from enhancement of the voices of priests to imitation of the cry of the quetzal, a bird of considerable significance in Mayan religion. Much mystical speculation unfortunately surrounds the Mayan and subsequent Inca cultures and it is difficult to establish with certainty that they were the masters of acoustics that contemporary accounts suggest. Such documentation as exists appears, sadly, to be at least somewhat contaminated by the predispositions of the disciples of Von Daniken et al and perhaps of questionable quality. Nonetheless, the precision of Mayan architectural design and execution is firmly established and, given its firm mathematical basis, it is not unreasonable to assume that their designers had at least some practical grasp of acoustic technology.
The doubts registered in the previous paragraph notwithstanding, the first widely established deliberate exploitations of acoustic principles are generally accepted to have taken place in the Graeco-Roman civilisations. Consequent upon their intellectual flowering, these cultures were increasingly aware of the nature of physical phenomenae but there seems little evidence that their theoretical knowledge included much about acoustics. Nonetheless, acoustic principles can be seen to have been incorporated into the design of buildings, most particularly theatres. Greek and Roman auditoria are characterised not only by the excellent sightlines offered to members of the audience, regardless of seating position but also by their almost uncanny acoustic clarity such that onstage sound is clearly audible throughout the theatre. This may fairly be interpreted as evidence that, while acoustics theory may have been at an early stage, practical application was well established and implemented to high standards.
Contemporary observers still refer to the “perfect” acoustics of certain classical theatres. (This is more widely reported in the earlier Greek buildings whereas later Roman structures apparently employed deliberate “reinforcement” systems rather than relying upon the achievement of optimal “passive” acoustics). While this view is not universally held and is based on an approach to performance no longer extant nor understood in detail, it is undeniable that many amphitheatres do possess acoustical qualities that can only be described as uncanny.
To sit far from a stage and yet clearly to hear speech declaimed at conversational volume is disconcerting and makes this writer look for concealed amplification equipment. It is fair to assume that this phenomenon is no accident but that it rather reflects the application of detailed knowledge. It is, however, questionable whether this knowledge has a theoretical basis or whether it is, in fact, purely “artisanal”.
Neither view, however, can detract from the sublime effectiveness of this “technology”. Much of this effective acoustic design is due to the curvature of the seating and the placing of the performing area at the focus of the curve but this factor alone does not provide the exceptional qualities offered by the later Roman designs wherein deliberate measures were taken to reinforce sound. The Roman approach was threefold: firstly, they adopted the curved, raked audience seating mentioned above. Secondly, the rear wall of the stage was designed to reflect sound forward into the auditorium. Thirdly, alcoves were concealed in this wall, often covered with fabrics or membranes of other materials. These served as large resonators in front of which a performer might stand to speak or play (the “reinforcement” system referred to earlier.) It has also been suggested that, in some theatres, the corridors behind and below the seating were sometimes used as acoustic conduits.
Masks have played, and continue to play a significant symbolic role in many cultures. The majority of mask structures serve to create a substantially visual impression upon the observer/ritual participant but many designs also serve the altogether more subtle purpose of projection or modulation of the voice of the wearer. This is achieved by the inclusion of horn-like shapes around the mouth and resonant cavities elsewhere within the structure of the mask. There is some contention about the use of masks in the Graeco-Roman tradition but there is at least a certain amount of evidence to support their use. There is little question, however that Oriental cultures appear to have made substantial use of these qualities, contemporary versions thereof appearing in (most notably) Balinese rituals.
Connection may be made here with the earlier suggestion that acoustic processes may well have formed a significant part of early rituals whereby the visual qualities of the mask as a transforming object were supported and reinforced by their acoustic properties. An otherwise familiar person could readily become transformed by the concealment of facial features and their supplanting by those of a member of the requisite mythology. How much more effective this could then become if their vocalisations could be likewise transformed!
The earliest positively identified purpose-built musical instruments date from around 2700 BC. By the time of the Graeco-Roman era, the main classes of musical instruments - wind, percussion and stringed - were long established in most cultures. Wind instruments, especially horns, continued to be used for communication although some societies adopted percussion instruments, especially drums for this purpose. Little major technical change then took place until the emergence of the keyboard. The date of this emergence is uncertain. There is, however, evidence for the existence of a form of organ as early as around 75 BC. These developments were paralleled by an increasing awareness of acoustics and their musical consequences with churches being designed to achieve desired sonic properties. These disciplines clearly related to the emerging awareness of physics, especially the concepts of reflection and focussing of light which could be used as a metaphor for the similar manipulation of sound.
Architects became aware that, to a certain extent, sound could be similarly manipulated. Many examples exist of spaces in which conversations being conducted elsewhere are clearly audible, perhaps the best known being the Whispering Gallery in St Pauls Cathedral, London. In this gallery, the gathering, reflecting and focussing properties of the concave interior of the famous dome serve to render clearly audible any sounds emanating from parts of the floor below. The system functions almost exactly as a reflecting telescope but acts upon sound rather than light. The same principles are used to create modern microphone systems for extremely directional recording. Here the cathedral dome is replaced by a clear acrylic parabola and the ears of eavesdroppers by a suitable microphone positioned at the focus.
Precursors of other contemporary technologies emerged too: opulent churches, especially Venetian, might even have multiple spatially separated choir areas: a clear forerunner of surround sound. Little, however, is known of the earliest attempts to record sound. It has been suggested that ancient Chinese cultures used simple recording technology to remind visitors to temples to close the door and to thank them when they did so. This system, as described by Hugh Davies utilised a stylus which, attached to the door, tracked a modulated groove in the floor as the door opened or closed. How the groove was modulated in the first place (ie how the recording was made) is unclear but, verifiably true or not, it is certainly one of the most charming anecdotes of the evolution of audio technology.
Attempts to create a sound recording system appear to have been made periodically over many years. There have been suggestions that Leonardo da Vinci built (or at least designed) a forerunner of the phonograph later invented by Edison but there does not appear to be any direct documentation to support these suggestions. There is dissension as to the precise date of the first sound recording or the identity of the first sound engineer. Some sources have it that the event took place in 1855 and that the person was a Frenchman, Leon Scott de Martinville whereas others suggest that it took place 48 years earlier in 1807 and that the recordist was Thomas Young, an American. There is, however, some consensus as to the medium employed: both used blackened cylinders. In Scott’s case a cylinder was wrapped in smoke-blackened paper whereas Young used a soot-coated cylinder. Both used similar mechanisms: a collecting horn feeding a membrane to which the recording stylus was fixed. As the cylinder rotated, the vibration of the stylus would scrape a trace in the coating, leaving a visible record of the sound collected by the horn. Unfortunately, the technology required to replay such a recording was not then available but, nonetheless, from 1859, Scott was able to market his device - known as a phonoautograph - as a laboratory instrument for the analysis of sound. Such instruments have remained in use until relatively recently - certainly the mid 1960s.
The first definitively confirmed recording took place on December 6 1877 in the workshop of Thomas Edison at Menlo Park, USA (latterly the home of several US computer companies). Edison was, at this time, an established inventor with many patents to his credit. A number of these were in the field of telegraphy and it is thought that his first “phonograph” was in fact a derivation of a telegraph repeater built the previous year. Indeed, it has been suggested that Edison’s original objective was not to record the human voice but to record and repeat Morse code and early sketches support this view. Schoenherr believes that an earlier recording may have been made on a paper medium some time in July 1877. Notes made by Edison support this theory but the recording has not survived unlike the December 6 recording which was made on a cylinder wrapped in tin foil. This recording - which still exists - features Edison himself declaiming the children’s poem “Mary had a little lamb “.
The physical structure of the experimental “phonograph” was simplicity itself. A cylinder was wrapped in soft tin foil and mounted upon a threaded shaft which was rotated manually. A collecting trumpet received incoming sound, causing a diaphragm to vibrate. A steel stylus was attached to this diaphragm and vibrated in sympathy with the sound. In so doing, it created a modulated groove, spiralling round the cylinder as it traversed beneath the stylus and representing the sound on the rotating tin foil. On the opposite side of the apparatus was another stylus, again connected to a diaphragm (although of greater flexibility that the recording diaphragm) which in turn propagated its sound by means of a second horn. Edison, together with engineer John Kreusi (the actual builder of the prototype phonograph), continued work on the system, resulting in the granting of a patent for a tinfoil - based phonograph with a recording capacity of 2 -3 minutes in February 1878.
The editor of “Scientific American” was impressed:
“It has been said that Science is never sensational; that it is intellectual, not emotional; but certainly nothing that can be conceived would be more likely to create the profoundest of sensations, to arouse the liveliest of human emotions, than once more to hear the familiar voices of the dead. Yet Science now announces that this is possible, and can be done…. Speech has become, as it were, immortal.”
Editorial “Scientific American “ June 1878
In the same year, the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company was created to manufacture and display the machines - now utilising removable cylinders of cardboard covered with foil - which became a music hall attraction due in no small measure to the charismatic presentations staged by Edison himself. Despite receiving a payment of $10,000 plus royalties, Edison himself lost interest in its further development for another 10 years. This was due, at least in part to his receipt of a “better offer”: to develop the electric light bulb !
Rubinstein points out that, although Edison created the first working recording machine, the concept of such a device predates his work by some months. Charles Cros delivered his plans for a disk-based machine to the French Academie des Sciences in Paris the previous April but his recorder was never built. In the absence of Edison’s promotional zeal, public interest in recording lapsed and it took its place among the many communications inventions of the late 19th century: telephones, improved telegraphs, motion pictures and electric lighting all competed with the phonograph for public attention.
Thus it was that recording languished until 1885 when inventor Alexander Graham Bell (a bitter rival of Edison) took up the challenge. Delegating the work to his cousin, Chichester Bell and Charles Tainter, an instrument maker, Bell was ultimately granted a patent for a machine not unlike Edison’s but using removable cylinders of carnuba wax and known as the “graphophone”. Their invention offered substantial improvements in both recording quality and duration due to the use of a freely movable stylus and a tighter pitch made possible by the use of wax as the recording medium. The variations in speed (and hence pitch) from which the Edison machine had suffered were resolved by the adoption of gravity, clockwork and even electric drive systems.
In 1888, Edison revived his interest in recording by adopting wax cylinders as his preferred medium, even introducing a battery-driven model but enthusiasm waned once more when it became apparent that their playing time was excessively restricted and that they could not be duplicated in commercially worthwhile quantities. Undeterred, Edison formulated the use of the phonograph as an office machine for dictation purposes and the wide exposure thus created led to the creation of the first juke boxes - coin operated phonographs located in drug stores and even “phonograph parlours” in which customers could request the recording of their choice (albeit suitably interspersed with advertisements).
In 1888 came the invention that would ultimately displace both rivals: the disk. Emile Berliner devised the “gramophone”, based on the original ideas of Charles Cros, using disks of hard “vulcanite” rubber as the recording medium. First marketed in 1893, this system had the immediate advantage that mass production of recorded material could be achieved easily and cheaply using masters made from zinc. What Berliner developed is, in essence the process by which disk recordings continue to be manufactured to the present day. His first machine used single-sided 7″ disks rotating at 70 rpm, giving a 2 minute maximum duration.
He described his invention thus:
“Gramophone: a talking machine wherein a sound is first traced into a fatty film covering a metal surface and which is then subjected to the action of an acid or etching fluid which eats the record into the metal. This record being a continuous wavy line of even depth is then rotated and not only vibrates the reproducing sound chamber but also propels the same by the hold its stylus retains in the record groove. The original record can be duplicated ad infinitum by first making an electrotyped reverse or matrix and then pressing the latter into hard rubber, celluloid or similar material which is soft when warm and quite hard when cold.”
Crucially, Berliner’s method allowed low-cost mass duplication of recordings: a first. Previously, the hapless artiste had to perform the work in question as many times as the production run of recordings. An interim solution appeared in the form of a 4-disk recorder but it was the etching and electroplating process invented by Berliner which made the manufacture of virtually limitless copies of a recording feasible. But by 1895, all factions of the new industry had improved their respective products with the introduction of clockwork motor drives and a range of other innovations which continued to appear throughout the decade. Playing times had increased to around 4 minutes and overall sound quality had improved substantially. Slow though the initial models were to gain acceptance, they represented an early foray into the marketplace and succeeded, as hoped, in attracting financial support for the further development of the gramophone which went on to secure a significant share of the market by 1896 when their National Gramophone Company released the Baby Grand Gramophone in direct competition to Edison’s more established cylinder technology. Developments aimed at improving audio quality and playing time continued. Disk production was improved by modifications to the mastering process and the adoption of shellac in place of vulcanite rubber or wax.
A major problem faced by both cylinders and disks was extremely heavy wear due to a stylus tracking weight of 9 ounces which quickly wore out a recording. Perhaps as a result, one patent application was made to use chocolate as the recording medium based on the argument that, when worn out, the disks could at least be eaten ! Sound was propagated from these machines by means of a horn (effectively a speaking trumpet): there was no such thing as amplification in the modern sense, although a compressed air powered amplifier was developed. This bizarre device presaged the conceptual basis of the electronic audio amplifier in that the small variations of air pressure derived from the recording medium were used to modulate a larger carrier medium (in this case, compressed air as opposed to the electricity used by contemporary electronic systems).
The design of horns became a critical factor in the success of any player and extensive experimentation and development ensued. What had begun as a largely arbitrary process became the subject of serious research by, amongst others, Bell Laboratories who developed the “exponential” horn with regularly increasing diameter thereby inducing less distortion and optimising concentrating and projecting power. This complex structure was ingeniously folded into a labyrinthine wooden cube, measuring in one extreme case (the “Credenza Orthophonic Victrola”) some 4 feet on a side. Here again a parallell may be drawn between this acoustic technology and the principles which informed the design of many hi-fi loudspeakers of the 1960s and 1970s.
Edison continued to improve the quality of his cylinder machines and solved the problem of mass production, making it possible to manufacture cylinders by conventional industrial moulding techniques, using new plastic materials such as celluloid and even introducing the diamond stylus. By 1912, however, the disk system had gained so much ground that even he was forced to begin production of such machines. As the cylinder declined, record (disk) players evolved into both larger and smaller forms with Decca producing the first portable gramophone in time for it to find extensive service as more or less the sole provider of entertainment in the trenches of World War 1 and, elsewhere, the gramophone emerging as a substantial piece of domestic furniture, to be found in every well-to-do family home.
An advertisement of the time read thus:
“What did you do in the Great War, Decca?”
“I was Mirth-Maker-in-Chief to His Majesty’s Forces; my role being to give our Soldiers and our Sailors music wherever they should be. In that capacity I saw service on every Front - France, Belgium, Egypt, Palestine, Italy and the Dardenelles; right in the Front Line and away back in Camps and Hospitals. All told, there were 100,000 “Deccas” on Active Service from start to finish of the War. And now that the War is over, I still pursue my calling but under pleasanter conditions.”
Records were now presented on both sides of 10 or 12 inch shellac disks at a standard speed of 78 rpm. Cylinders were gradually abandoned by successive manufacturers from 1906 onwards with the last Edison cylinder being produced in 1913. The last cylinder recordings to be marketed saw the light of day in 1929, one of the victims of the famous Wall Street Crash. By this time, electronics had evolved from wartime experiments in “wireless telephony”, broadcast radio was a reality and the disk system had provided irrefutable demonstrations of its superiority. Both cylinder and disk systems, however, suffered greatly as a result of the impact of radio which, exploiting a newer, superior technology - electronics - was able to offer sound of far higher audio quality. Not even the adoption of “electric recording” was able to save the recording industry from the catastrophic decline that followed. In 1927, nearly 1 million record players and over 100 million records were sold. By 1932, these figures had declined to 40 thousand and 6 million respectively.
Edison himself died in 1931.