Sound recording

technology

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.

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