Electrical recording

technology

The replacement of the acoustic recording horn by a microphone, amplifier and electromagnetic cutter, developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories and licensed by Western Electric to the major American record companies in 1925. Victor contracted for commercial use of the system in March 1925 and issued its first electrically recorded orchestral sides that April. The technical change is measurable: the acoustic process captured roughly 250 to 2,500 hertz, while the Western Electric system as developed by Harrison and Maxfield handled something like 50 to 6,000 hertz. What that meant musically is more interesting than the numbers. Instruments that acoustic recording could barely register — the double bass, the bass drum, a quiet guitar, an unforced voice — became recordable, so ensembles no longer had to be rearranged around the limits of a horn. Rhythm sections could be heard; a singer could sing rather than shout. Much of what makes recordings from the later 1920s onward sound like music rather than like documents is this change, and it arrived exactly as the traditions in this Journey were first being captured in quantity.

A technology is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.