On the record
From wax to earbuds, the remarkable story of how sound was captured.
INTO THE GROOVE: The Story of Sound from Tin Foil to Vinyl, by Jonathan Scott (Bloomsbury, $39.99). Out now in ebook; hardback in July.
We’re surrounded by the sound of other voices. You wake up to local radio news, listen to a podcast in your car, pop on some workout music on your evening run and unwind at night by spinning an old Miles Davis album on your turntable. We take it for granted, but recorded sound is a miracle frozen in time.
Barely 150 years ago, the idea of audio on demand would have been unthinkable. In his genial new book, music writer Jonathan Scott serves up a chatty, trivia-filled survey of how the first records came to be.
Progress rarely travels in a straight line, and the invention of concepts such as photography and recorded sound went through many false starts. Etching paper coated in lampblack was the basis of one early record attempt, for example. “Unplayable paper records, creepy speaking machines, telegraphs and telephones together formed the crucible in which the phonograph was forged,” Scott writes. He ably conjures up a sense of awe over how humans captured sound: “How is it that plastic, albeit plastic arranged in a very specific way, can sing?”
When we think of vinyl we think of music, but Scott shows how records changed society. Political speeches, medical instructions, Shakespeare plays and even dirty limericks all were etched into permanence: “The groove not only changed how we listen, it changed what we listened to.”
It’s worth repeating that for nearly all
of human history, if the person wasn’t in direct earshot, you would never hear their voice. As one man commented in 1879 as the first recordings crackled to life, “How startling also it will be to reproduce and hear at pleasure the voice of the dead! All of these things are to be common, everyday experiences within a few years.”
Today, we “listen to the dead” every time we crank up David Bowie or Prince. The voice has become immortal.
Into The Groove spans from Thomas Edison-backed wax cylinders through the rise of shellac 78 records and long-playing vinyl right up to the digital era.
There’s a haunting allure to the earliest recorded sounds, which, Scott writes, often sound “like a microphone has been placed under a mattress and then submerged in a pool of standing water”. Yet the “grainy, dreamlike quality” of listening to the faint, fuzzy melodies of an orchestra in 1888, now easily found on YouTube, still seems strangely beautiful from the vantage point of 2023.
Early recording sessions were awkward affairs where musicians would cluster around tiny recording horns, speedily changing positions to capture each player. “My boys had to be athletes,” one producer recalls.
Sound changed quickly. Scott compares a recording of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue made acoustically in 1924 with one recorded using electrical technology in 1927, and when you hunt down and listen to them online, the immense depth and power a mere three years of advancement created is startling.
It’s a fine line to balance writing for the devoted audiophile who’ll suck down sentences about stylus points and groove width with the more casual reader simply curious about how this “singing plastic” came to dominate our cultural lives. Scott maintains a witty tone, which helps smooth over some passages which get a bit bogged down in the drudgery of competing patent claims and the minutiae of technological changes. “We’ve had our fill of scientists and suits, opera buffs and classical snobs,” he jests at one point.
The book sometimes buckles under the sheer weight of attempting to cover everything from eccentric Victorians to the first record going into space on the Voyager 1 probe. It also dashes through the rise and fall of cassettes, CDs and MP3s in a few pages, which does leave it feeling a bit abrupt.
In a sign that the history of music can’t really be contained in one relatively short book, Scott encourages the reader to dive further into the dusty corners of audio history with a hefty 40-page appendix of links, glossary and facts.
Where Into The Groove works best is in evoking that vanished world, where nobody could imagine the voice of anybody on Earth could one day fit into your pocket. The next time you put on your headphones, it’s worth thinking about the winding road that sound took to get here. ▮