A Timeline of Technological Advances in Music

Alan Cross (0:00)

Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the Ongoing History of New Music early and ad-free on Amazon Music, included with Prime.

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Alan Cross (1:09)

This probably won't come as much of a shock, but I'm something of a nerd when it comes to technology. Yeah, I like gadgets and devices and toys and machines that go bing. But I'm especially interested in the tech that affects music and vice versa. Back around 2013, I got involved with a company that created a touring museum exhibit that went to science centers around North America. And the owner of the company came up with the idea when he heard an ongoing history program called Format Wars, which looked at all the different ways music was captured, stored, and distributed. It was vinyl, tape, CDs, and so on. We called the exhibit The Science of Rock and Roll, and it explored how science and music have influenced each other, not just over the years, but over centuries. The two things go hand in hand, each affecting the other, providing ways for creativity to expand into directions that were once thought impossible. And the exhibit did okay too, booking runs at science centers in Toronto and Boston and Kansas City and Detroit and Cleveland and a few other places. The Science of Rock spun off a children's book that I co-wrote called The Science of Song, and it's aimed at kids 13 and under and STEM teaching, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Now, it's been a minute since the book and the museum exhibit and that original format war show, so I thought it might be time to revisit the subject. And with that in mind, here's a timeline of the biggest technological advances in music ever.

Prepare to geek out.

SPEAKER_4 (2:43)

This is the Ongoing History of New Music podcast with Alan Cross.

Alan Cross (2:50)

Hello again, I'm Alan Cross.

We're all affected by technology, and our lives are changing more and more and faster and faster because of it each year. I mean, just look at how much the world has been altered by the introduction of the smartphone. It hasn't been that long. Science fiction once promised that we'd one day all walk around with a magical device that allowed us access to virtually all the knowledge of humankind. But we had no idea how much a device would change things. Now that we have it, it's kind of hard to imagine life without it. This program will look at 10 giant leaps when technology, specifically gear and hardware, changed music forever. All, well, mostly all, for the benefit of everyone.

Everything begins in November 1877, when Thomas Edison revealed a new invention called the phonograph, by way of an article in Scientific American magazine. He described a device that could capture and store sound for later playback. After the first practical demonstrations were given, he officially applied for a patent on December 24th, 1877

Now, music had not been in his plan. He was actually looking for ways to improve the telegraph and the telephone. But along the way, he noticed that a needle connected to a diaphragm that responded to changes in air pressure caused by sound could etch a groove into a soft surface. Placing the needle at the beginning of this groove allowing it to trace the zigs and zags, reproduced the sound that made them in the first place. This, he thought, would make a great telephone answering machine. He demonstrated it by reciting a nursery rhyme. The original recording was never preserved, but Edison did recreate it.

Thomas Edison (4:42)

In the first words I spoke in the original phonograph, a little piece of practical poetry. Mary had a little lamb, its meat was white as snow, and every wire that Mary went to the lamb would shun it all.

Alan Cross (4:58)

The first storage medium was a rotating cylinder, like the inside of a toilet roll. The soft medium in which the grooves were etched was tinfoil, and it had a maximum capacity of about two minutes. In addition to its use as a telephone answering machine, Edison thought it would be good for recording speeches. It could be an office dictation machine. It could be used as an educational tool, books for the blind, clocks that announce the time, and preserving languages. But recording music? Never even crossed his mind. After demonstrating his phonograph in 1877, he moved on to other things like the light bulb, and didn't come back to the device until the 1880s. Other inventors like Alexander Graham Bell took notice of phonographic technology and improved on Edison's original design. This ultimately led to Emil Berliner a few years later, who used a flat rotating disk instead of a cylinder, and that gave way to the modern vinyl record about 50 years later. So we can say that Edison's machine gave birth to the entire recorded music industry, and introduced the public to the concept of capturing music for all time, something that had been considered magical for thousands of years. Here's an example of what his machine sounded like. This is from 1877, so the audio quality, not exactly hi-fi. What we hear is someone playing a cornet, Edison reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb, Edison having a little laugh, and then reciting Old Mother Hubbard.