Charting first recording of sound
THE SOUND OF SONG THE recording is crackly – not surprising, given its remarkable age – but there is no mistaking its cultural importance.
The setting was Thomas Edison’s invention factory in West Orange, New Jersey. All manner of scientific investigation took place here, among them the reproduction of sound.
Edison was in a race with rival companies to find a way of achieving this. And it was a race he won – when, speaking into the mouthpiece of a phonograph he devised in December 1877, he recorded himself reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb, thus becoming the first person ever to record and play back sound. The machine recorded directly on to tinfoil. It astounded people, Prof Paul Israel tells composer and musician Neil Brand at the start of this excellent three-part series, “because this simple device suddenly could not just record but play back sound – something nobody had ever done before.
“Nobody had ever heard recorded sound,” the professor adds. “Now we can’t think about life without it, and yet, there it was.” By 1888, Edison had developed a machine that recorded onto wax cylinders. Such devices were marketed as office dictation machines, but Edison had realised, in 1887, their potential as a means of bringing recorded music to the masses.
Over time, the developing technology – from the first gramophone to the first microphone and the first recording studio – transformed the style of music that audiences enjoyed.
Brand has gone back to basics – to the ingenious Edison and his factory in West Orange – to bring us the story of the revolution that would result in what Brand terms the 20th century sound of song. The featured stars tonight range from Irving Berlin to Bessie Smith. In the series Brand looks at every moment in the life cycle of a song: how songs are written, performed and recorded, and the changing ways we have listened to them. What is it about all these elements that make songs so special to us?