Sound recording

Assembled from 18 blocks · 2 evidence · 14 related

1. Story
2. The set of techniques that made a performance into an object, and in doing so changed musical diffusion from something that moved at the speed of people to something that moved at the speed of freight. Thomas Edison demonstrated recorded and reproduced sound with the tinfoil phonograph in 1877, working with a cylinder and a vertically cut groove. Emile Berliner was granted a patent on 8 November 1887 for a machine that cut a lateral groove of even depth, and shortly afterwards moved from cylinder to flat disc — the decisive step commercially, because a disc could be pressed from a master in quantity at low unit cost, which a cylinder could not. Two consequences run through the rest of this Journey. Music could now cross an ocean without a musician, so a style could be learned by someone who had never met anyone who played it. And because pressing required capital, what got recorded was decided by companies, which means the surviving record of early twentieth-century music is not a sample of what was played but a sample of what somebody expected to sell.
3. Knowledge
4. Sound recording
5. Connections
6. Electrical recording
7. Race records
8. Radio diffusion
9. Field recording
10. Edison demonstrates recorded and reproduced sound
11. Berliner patents the gramophone
12. The first jazz record is made
13. KDKA broadcasts
14. Victor and Columbia adopt electrical recording
15. The Kumasi Trio record in London
16. Evidence
17. Berliner was granted a gramophone patent on 8 November 1887 for recording in a lateral groove of even depth, and moved from cylinder to flat disc, which could be mass-produced far more cheaply than Edison's cylinders. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary attributed to Library of Congress and Smithsonian collection materials; neither page was opened and the patent number is not given.
18. Edison introduced the phonograph in 1877, ten years before Berliner's gramophone patent, establishing recorded and reproduced sound. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary attributed to this Library of Congress timeline; the timeline page was not opened and no entry in it is quoted.