History of Music Recording and Reproduction — Part One (by Mateus Genero)
The word music has a long and interesting history. It comes from musiké téchne, which means “art of the Muses”. The Muses were the goddesses of art and inspiration in Greek mythology, and they were often associated with music.
They were included in the tales of early Western authors, Homer and Hesiod, and eventually came to be associated specifically with music. In later Greek literature, the word is used to refer to all kinds of music, including that which is played on instruments.
The Romans borrowed the word music from the Greeks, and it eventually made its way into English. In the Middle Ages, music was often used to refer to the art of composition, while in the Renaissance it came to mean the art of performance.
Nowdays, music is used to describe both the art of composition and the art of performance. And it has always been an important part of human culture, as a powerful form of communication that can be used to preserve our views about ourselves and the world we see.
Connecting with our past generations, through the recordings they bequeathed to us, we have the opportunity to use that knowledge to walk our own paths. In this article, we will approach the evolution of these recordings that precede us.
Musical Notation
Over the millennia, we have created several musical systems that have evolved to the present, of which the most widespread is tonal music with tempered tuning. Before, however, it is interesting to talk about archaeological records that indicate human musical practice since prehistory.
Music notation is a way of writing music so that it can be recorded, read, and played by musicians. It is made up of a set of symbols which represent different musical sounds. This means that when a musician looks at a piece of music written in notation, they can play it in a way which is similar to how the composer or arranger intended.
While there are archaeological records of musical instruments dating back 43,000 years, the earliest records of musical notation are much more recent. Being made in archaeological sites in the Middle East, more precisely in the regions of Syria and Iraq, which belonged to ancient Mesopotamia.
Archaeologists in the 1950s uncovered 29 3,400-year-old clay tablets in a small cubicle in the ancient port city of Ugarit on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. One of the tablets, known as H6, was in relatively good condition and featured lyrics with what is believed to be the world’s earliest example of musical notation.
Through diligence and painstaking work, scholars have managed to reconstruct ancient tablets, learning what was written on them, interpreting their meaning, and striving to recapture the musical notation so that the music may be played once again.
The archeologist Dumbrill, professor of archaeomusicology at Babylon University in Iraq, who has worked on the Ugarit tablets for more than two decades, suggests that the ancient Sumerians had songs for all sorts of occasions and moods, not just hymns for religious events.
A song on an ancient tablet provides insight into the lives of the people who wrote it. The oldest known musical composition, tells the story of a girl selling beer in a bar, but the tablet known as H6 details a more sober story.
“It’s about a young girl who cannot have any children; she thinks that the reason is because she misbehaved in some way, which is not mentioned,” Dumbrill said. “And from what we can understand of the text, which is quite limited, she goes at night to pray to the goddess Nigal, who was the goddess of the moon. She brings a little pot of tin with sesame seeds or sesame oil in it, which she offers to the goddess, and that’s all we know about the text.”
So, because it is so hard to interpret the Hurrian language, the meaning of the text is very unclear. But here is a simplified English version:
‘’I will (bring x?) in the form of lead at the right foot (of the divine throne)
I will (purify ?) and change (the sinfulness).
Once sins are) no longer covered and need no longer be changed,
I feel well having accomplished the sacrifice.
(Once I have) endeared (the deity), she will love me in her heart,
the offer I bring may wholly cover my sin
bringing sesame oil3 may work on my behalf
in awe may I …
The sterile may they make fertile,
Grain may they bring forth.
She, the wife, will bear (children) to the father.
May she who has not yet borne children bear them.’’
[From Hans-Jochen Thiel (1977), “The text and sequence of notes of the musical text of Ugarit”]
Since Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, a professor of Assyriology at the University of California, produced an interpretation of the musical piece in the 1960s, other scholars of the ancient world have published their own versions.
An audio book called Sounds From Silence, narrating information about ancient Near Eastern music, has been published by Professor Kilmer and Richard Crocker of the University of California at Berkeley. Along with this, a booklet presenting photographs and translations of the tablets from which the song above comes is included.
This interpretation of the song, titled “A Hurrian Cult Song from Ancient Ugarit,” is performed on a lyre, which is likely much closer to the instrument that the song’s first audiences heard.
This version of the song is available for purchase, or you can listen to interpretations of the song by other scholars at Urkesh Public and in the video clip below:
Music Reproduction
The history of repetitive audio technologies can be traced back to the middle of the ninth century when three scholarly brothers from Baghdad, known as the Banu Musa, designed an automatic flute player.
This machine could reproduce an audio sequence with minimal human intervention and was based on hydraulic pressure generated by flowing water in a reservoir. The flute’s melody was encoded on rotating cylindrical drums using raised pins. The pins activated levers that opened or closed the flute’s holes.
Their innovative machine is described in a recently published book called Allah’s Automata: Artifacts of the Arabic-Islamic Renaissance (800–1200).
As the title of Allah’s Automata suggests, these devices were both scientific and spiritual. Siegfried Zielinski, chair for media theory at Berlin University of the Arts, penned an essay:
‘’When a religious institution wishes to articulate its faith to its believers, it needs to use a medium to illustrate and convey the meaning of what it wishes to communicate. For example, God uses the engineer who believes in him to construct an automaton that, in turn, is used as a medium for praising him.’’
Zielinski highlights Banū Mūsā’s final remark in their 9th-century music automaton guide: “The instrument […] is finished with the power and strength of Allah.”
Though the devices did not have religious themes, their reflection of human ingenuity was seen as a symbol of God’s glory.
Despite the fact that the original Banū Mūsā’s diagram and manuscript are lost, 20th century photographs provide a description of the instrument.
The significance of the player piano and MIDI software endures today as we are able to produce tunes that sound similar to the curious device from the 9th century. Even if we don’t know what the original device sounded like, we can imagine how it may have influenced the music of today.
Athanasius Kircher’s automatic hydraulic organ, presented in his Musurgia Universalis, was based on a similar principle 800 years later, around 1650.
Kircher’s organ was not the first Western European mechanical device to encode melody by way of a rotating pinned cylinder. Church bells were activated by cylinders of this kind from the fourteenth century, and carillons from the sixteenth century.
At roughly the same time, similar devices were employed for barrel organs to allow them to be heard over the commotion of streets and fairs.
The eighteenth century saw the rise in popularity of small barrel organs known as serinettes among the French aristocracy. These organs were used to teach melodies to pet birds, hence the French verb seriner (to teach something through continuous repetition), which is similar to the English expression “to drum something in.”.
In the 1800s, people started using organettes and orchestrions. These portable organs could play predetermined musical sequences. They were based on the model of an automatic flute player. But instead of having raised pins, they had perforated bands of paper wrapped around a cylinder.
Music Recording
Between the end of the 10th century and the beginning of the 20th century, Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented a device considered a precursor of the phonograph.
Phonautograph
The phonautograph was the first device capable of recording sounds on cylinders of paper, wood or glass with a layer of soot, without, however, having the ability to reproduce them.
In 2008, a team of American historians and technicians managed to extract the sound from an 1860 recording of the French folk song “Au clair de la lune”, found the same year in an archive in Paris. The song is considered to be the oldest recording in the world.
Two decades later, in 1878, Thomas A. Edison created the first device capable of recording and reproducing sounds.
Phonograph
The phonograph was developed by Edison as a device for recording the spoken voice. The device, patented by its inventor, consisted of a cylinder with grooves, covered by a tin foil. It was quickly adopted as a means of recording music, opening up possibilities that were not previously available in the field, for the recording of music around the world.
In 1888, Thomas Edison sent his phonograph to London, England, to American Colonel George Gouraud. On 14 August 1888, at a press conference, Gouraud presented the phonograph to London during which the piano and cornet recording of Arthur Sullivan’s “The Lost Chord” was played. This was one of the first music recordings ever made.
At the time he said: “I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the result of this evening’s experiments: astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever.”
These recordings were discovered at the Edison Library in New Jersey in the 1950s.
In 1887, German engineer Emil Berliner changed the game with another invention that would soon revolutionize the music market. He used a flat disc to reproduce recorded sound, as opposed to Thomas Edison’s phonograph cylinder.
Gramophone
The development of the phonograph took a major step forward with the invention of the record phonograph, or gramophone. Emile Berliner is generally credited with this invention, which was introduced commercially in the United States in 1889.
Records were easier to produce and transport than cylinders, and they could have two engravings (one on each side) instead of just one. Furthermore, people preferred buying discs to cylinders, so by 1910, disc sales had surpassed those of cylinders.
The Edison Disc Record was Edison’s response to the gramophone’s growing popularity. However, eventually the audio disc format became the standard means of consuming sound recordings. The 78rpm disc was the most common format from 1910 to the end of the 1950s.
The recording industry sought to replace the material from which the old 78 rpm records were made, since the 1920s. So, they attempted to replace the organic material from which they were made, shellac, with plastic alternatives. Thus, records made of polyvinyl chloride were released by Victor, one of the first record companies in the United States, still in that decade. Also resulting from the merger of Berliner Gramophone (company of the inventor of the gramophone, Emil Berliner) with the Consolidated Talking Machine (of a partner of Berliner, Eldridge R. Johnson), leaving the latter with the control of operations.
While there is no one standard speed that all companies adhere to, the major recording companies typically use 78 Rpm (revolutions per minute). This speed was originally established in the US, but differs slightly from the speed used in the rest of the world due to variances in frequency. This small difference in speed is what gave the disc its nickname, “the seventy-eight”.
Discs are usually made from fragile materials like shellac or plastic derivatives. The needles used to play the disc are also made from a variety of materials, including steel, carbon, thorns, and sapphire. The lifespan of a disc depends on how it is played.
Early recording methods, which did not rely on electronic amplification, had limited sensitivity and frequency range. Middle frequencies were recorded accurately, but very low (bass) and very high (treble) frequencies were not. Instruments such as the violin did not transfer well to record, but this problem was partially solved by mounting a conical horn at the rear of the instrument, which acted as an acoustic box. The horn was eliminated as soon as electronic recording was developed.
At the end of the 1940s, Hungarian engineer Peter Carl Goldmark took the first step with his invention that would, in the future, almost completely replace the 78 rpm record.
(Part Two coming next week)
