This post is co-written by our editors and YooCare.
The Earliest Vehicle: Seeing Sound
In 1857, a French scientist named Leon Scott invented a machine called the ‘acoustic vibrometer’. This machine was the originator of the tape recorder. We know that sound is produced by vibration, and this machine, through a layer of membrane that vibrates with sound waves like the eardrum of the human ear, and a pig bristle, could convert the energy produced by sound vibration into a thin, twisted line, which was inscribed on a piece of soot paper. It was the first time that man had transformed hearing into sight. This acoustic vibrometer, however, merely recorded the fluctuations of sound on a flat surface; it did not play them back. Fast forward 20 years to 1877, and Thomas Edison, the man who invented the light bulb and the telephone, was working in his laboratory on ways to improve telephone and telegraph technology when he observed that a vibrating diaphragm caused the tip of a needle to leave traces on a soft surface when sound was passed through a telephone microphone. He then thought that if he could find a way to record these traces and make them playable, it would be possible to invent a machine for recording and replaying sound. He then embarked on a series of experiments with his assistants, and finally invented the phonograph, the first tape recorder in the true sense of the word for human beings.
The center of this device is a rotating cylinder covered with a thin layer of metal foil. A sharp steel needle was fixed to a vibrating diaphragm, and as the sound passed through, the needle scratched a series of waveform grooves in the metal foil. To replay the recorded sound, Edison devised a similar system, placing the needle on a previously scratched trace, and as the cylinder rotated, the needle would move along this trace, thereby vibrating the diaphragm and horn to reproduce the sound. To test the machine, Edison read aloud a few lines from an English-language children’s song that originated in 1830, “Mary Had a Little Sheep,” and recorded them on a phonograph. These childish lyrics were the beginning of human success in capturing and storing sound. The invention of the phonograph also marked the first time that mankind was able to record and playback sound, laying the foundation for the later development of the music industry and talkies.
Shellac Discs
In the days of the phonograph, all kinds of recordings and music were stored on a small drum with a tin foil or wax paper surface. But because of the material, these recordings were not only of poor quality, they were also not very durable and could not be played very often. The demands on the recording process were also very high, as it could not be duplicated, and it was said that at the time, if someone ordered 100 records, then the record company would have to send the singer to record 100 times or more. So, in order to improve the usability and stability of the phonograph, a group of inventors and scientists began to improve the phonograph and the storage medium.
In 1888, Emil Berliner, a German engineer who stayed in the U.S., improved Edison’s cylinder phonograph and introduced the world’s first disk-type phonograph, which was exhibited in Philadelphia, USA. This new phonograph, using a piece of wax coated round metal zinc plate, to play and record as an intermediary media, and can be made into a fixed template for record reproduction, the solution to the sale of 100 records singers have to record 100 times the big problem, you can think of it as we are now familiar with the ancestor of the vinyl record. Soon after, Emile Birchner used vulcanized rubber instead of waxed zinc plates, and in early 1890, he successfully mass-produced 5-inch vulcanized rubber records for sale in Europe. These records were released in Germany in a run of 25,000 and are very rare today. It is said that the world’s oldest commercial records are from this batch, so it can also be said that Berliner is the father of commercial records.
Five years later, in 1895, it was Emile Birchner, who had his eye on a new material called “shellac”. Wormwood is a sticky substance secreted by a pest called a mesquite, which hardens when it dries. At that time, shellac was collected from infected trees, mixed with other materials such as clay and cotton fibers, and colored with charcoal black to make a flat, round record called “Shellac Disc”. 1897 and onwards, shellac records were widely mass-produced, and because of the coarse grain and the rotation speed of 78 revolutions per minute, they were widely known as “78 RPM Records” or “78 RPM Coarse Records”. After 1897, wormwood records were widely produced in mass quantities, and because of their coarse grain and 78 revolutions per minute, they were also widely known as “78 revolutions records” or “78 revolutions coarse grain records”. Emile Birchner’s improvements to the record-making process made it easier to reproduce and preserve recordings, and became the industry standard. As the quality of wormwood records continued to improve, the foundations of the modern record industry were laid.
It took about 35 years to find a durable, sustainable material for the record industry, from the earliest ashtrays, to cylinder records, to wormwood records. In April 1902, the tenor singer Caruso became the first singer to become famous for his recordings when he recorded his compositions and released them on wormwood, and more and more singers followed, opening up the demand for the record market. 1913 also saw the world’s first complete orchestral record, recorded by the Victory Gramophone Company. Victory Gramophone Company, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with Nikisch conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
Interestingly enough, the advent of the wormwood record also had a major impact on music-making – the limitation of recording only a few minutes on a single side determined the length of future popular songs. At that time, the traditional music of almost all the peoples of the world was not so short that it could not be recorded in its entirety on this record. Therefore, musicians and musicians of that time began to create pop songs based on this time feature. As the influence of the “78 rpm record” expanded among the people, the habit of listening to music was also standardized. Even today, most of the songs we listen to are still around 3 to 4 minutes long.
Vinyl
In 1939, World War II broke out.
Because one of the main ingredients, poppy tungstic acid, was one of the raw materials used in the manufacture of bullet-proof glass and military equipment such as UV and radiation protection, shellac became a key military material during the war years and was controlled by the government. This brought the development of recordings to a standstill. At that time, many of the records were taken away by the government and stored for military use. Record companies could not produce new records because of the lack of material, so they had to ask people who came to buy records to exchange a certain number of old records for new ones, so that they could recycle the material and continue to make new records. So a lot of music was lost.
With the end of World War II in 1945, the record industry was not idle, and in 1948, a fellow at Columbia Records’ CBS Labs, Peter Goldmark, who loved classical music, was so dissatisfied with having to change records to play classical music on 78 rpm polyvinyl records, that he vowed to modify them. At the time, there were two known ways to increase the recording time – slowing down the speed of the record and increasing the number of grooves on the record. But in doing so, the sound quality of the record would suffer, such as increasing distortion, amplifying noise, and even narrowing the frequency response range. His solution was to use diamonds for the stylus and vinylite, or PVC, as the record material, to reduce the speed of the record to 33.3 revolutions per minute and to increase the groove density, so that a 12-inch (about 30 centimeters) record could be played for about 20 to 30 minutes of music per side.
On June 21, 1948, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, Columbia Records held a press conference to officially launch their development of this record. At the launch event, they stacked up a large number of polyvinyl records on the floor at a height of almost 2 or 3 meters. Then Wallerstein, the chairman of Columbia Records at the time, walked up to the podium with a stack of records that added up to less than 50cm, and said to the journalists, “See, folks? These new records in my hand alone contain all the 78 rpm records in the pile next to it! This is our Long Playing Record,” which we now often talk about as vinyl, also known as LPs or mixtapes. The advantages of vinyl over acetate were that it could store more songs, it was less fragile, more durable, better preserved, and the sound quality was clearer and more informative, so it quickly replaced acetate as the dominant music carrier of the time. Not only that, because vinyl can be recorded sound quality is very high, it in turn also pushed the recording technology, sound engineering at that time is struggling to develop a hand, so that people’s ears can hear the sound quality is getting better and better.
In order to counteract the momentum of LPs on the market, Radio Corporation of America (RCA) also introduced their own carrier. They decided that sometimes you don’t need to play so many songs on one record, so although they used the same material, their record was a different size, only 7 inches and 45 revolutions, referred to as the Extended-Playing Record, also known as EP. EP records have about 20 minutes of storage time, and you can put 5 songs on them. The advantage of EP is that it is small, thin, easy to carry, less fragile, and the transportation cost is also low, which is very suitable for the singles market that is concerned about the time. As you may have noticed, although the term vinyl is no longer used exclusively to refer to vinyl records, the names LP and EP are still in use today, except that LP now refers to albums of 10 songs or so, while EP is a mini-album of 5 songs or so.
Another very important creation in the history of music regarding EPs is the invention of the jukebox by RCA. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched any American TV shows set in the 70’s or 80’s, but we see bars, nightclubs or restaurants with a glass cabinet next to a pool table. Inside the cabinet is a variety of music turntables, mostly EP records, and customers can drop in coins to pick the songs they want to listen to. These machines quickly became popular, and people began to categorize music in order to find their favorite songs faster, leading to a gradual systematization of genres. This was the beginning of how the public began to categorize music. And the jukebox brought music more into people’s lives, no longer just something to be enjoyed at home or in a concert hall.
LPs have also had a significant impact on music creation, the most important in my opinion being the formation of the so-called ‘album’ concept, where 10 to 12 songs can be recorded on an LP.
With the ability to record 10 to 12 songs on an LP, the packaging and production of multi-song compilations became a reality for the first time in the music industry, and the release of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967 is considered to be one of the earliest definitions of the modern album format1.
This work describes the same kind of music as the album’s title. It describes the story of the fictional band that shares the album’s title, from its formation to its dissolution, and all of the songs on the album relate to this complete story. This type of narrative was very novel at the time, and it broke the traditional pattern of fragmented narratives of album songs, opening up new possibilities for musical creation. The Beatles further demonstrated their musical talent through this concept album.
With the onset of globalization, phonographs and record players were sent all over the world, and vinyl records were the dominant carrier of music for three decades, with many classic albums and music being born during this period. In addition to the Beatles, Bob Dylan’s 1966 seventh studio album, Blonde on Blonde, is also a great work. Its rich lyrics, complex musical structures and innovative recording techniques have made it one of the most important albums in rock history, and in 2003 it was added to the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically and aesthetically important.
Cassette
About the story of magnetic tape, we have to go back to 1888, when a scientist called Oberlin Smith, put forward a vision: he thought that with the phenomenon of electric current and magnetization, it was possible to record and play back the sound on a steel wire, but the state of the art at that time had not been able to realize this idea. Until 1898, a Danish scientist called Polson, with this vision as the principle, invented the magnetic wire recorder, the audio stored on a thin wire.
When sound passes through the microphone, the vibrations of the sound waves are converted into a current signal, which is transmitted to the current coil of the magnetic head of the tape recorder, thus constantly generating a magnetic field corresponding to this change in sound, which is electromagnetic induction. And this magnetic field will be different strength to magnetize the movement of the wire, so that the wire has a magnetic, and recorded sound magnetization strength and direction. And reversing the process above is playback.
This is technically a new breakthrough, but the use of steel wire as a carrier has very many inconveniences, whether it is the way of recording, carrying, preservation, price or sound quality, are not better than the worm glue or vinyl records, so it has never been used on a large scale. Later, a scientist called Fritz Pfleumer thought that since the magnetic field was to be recorded, changing the thin steel wire to paper tape coated with magnetic powder would theoretically have a recording effect, and it would be easy to manufacture and store, and subsequent experiments confirmed that his idea was correct. So in 1928, Pfleumer designed the world’s first tape recorder, the prototype of the modern tape recorder and magnetic tape, was born.
In 1935, German engineers invented a plastic tape with an iron oxide coating to replace paper tape, and magnetic tape was born. At the same time, the German company AEG was authorized by Pfleumer to start mass production of tape recorders. Thus, magnetic tape, as the newest “sound storage” medium, also entered our sights.
After that, this tape recorder has been improved and refined. During this time, it was mainly used in the military or in offices, as its sound quality was not yet suitable for recording or playing music. The carrier of the music was still wormwood and vinyl records.
It wasn’t until 1963 that Philips produced the familiar cassette tape, which held 30-45 minutes of stereo music per side, by putting the rolled tape in a small plastic box the size of a human hand. And when Philips in 1964 disclosed the cassette tape patents and format, so that all manufacturers can use free of charge, cassette tape is the beginning of rapid development, sound quality is getting better and better, storage capacity is getting higher and higher, recording, playback equipment is also more and more small and more convenient, so that it became and vinyl as among the mainstream of the music carrier.
Sony created the tape player that changed the way everyone would listen to music in the future, the Walkman Walkman, which should be the most familiar form of tape player to all of us. The world’s first Walkman was called the TPS-L2, and in the movie Guardians of the Galaxy, it was used by Star-Lord in the opening scene. It was just the right size to fit in your hand, metallic, blue and silver with orange accents, and now it seems to have a pretty high value.
This pocket-sized cassette tape recorder was a worldwide hit once it hit the market. Compared to the bulky upright recorders, the Walkman was very small in size and avant-garde in design. Music has also followed the Walkman into a variety of life scenarios, commuting, between classes, hanging out in the park, jogging …… Listening to songs on a Walkman is still a very private thing, “headphones on, who does not love” is from the Walkman era, the way people enjoy music has been greatly rewritten.
In fact, in the eighties there was also an interesting device called the Boombox, a machine that looked like a giant brick, but was also considered a portable tape recorder, usually with its own handle and huge speakers. It had a lot of features, it could play cassette tapes, record on tape, and listen to the radio as well. If you’re familiar with the street hip-hop culture of the time, you’ve seen it in some classic scenes. It can be said that the Boombox added to the hip-hop culture of the American streets.
So compared to vinyl, I believe that for many 80s and 90s people, cassette tapes are the true symbol of youth. Hasn’t everyone taken a pencil and rolled the tape back into the box? Have you ever copied the lyrics from a cassette tape? Or exchanged tapes with others? Hasn’t everyone also listened to the radio on a tape player or recorded their favorite songs on it?
Owning a tape player was once the desire of many music fans, including me. Unfortunately, due to the change of technology and time, there are very few tape decks in the market that are still mass-producing music-focused tape decks.
When I was a teenager, cassette tapes and CDs were the most important things for me to express my devotion to music. But soon the era of the CD passed, and in 1995 the MP3 format was introduced, in 1998 Samsung of Korea invented the MP3 player, and in 2001 Apple introduced the iPod. I was equally excited by the sheer volume of music that was available online, and seemed to forget about tapes and CDs all of a sudden. Then came the streaming platforms; Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, Bandcamp, SoundCloud. Too many to mention, and YouTube to listen to songs on. From these platforms, we can hear more songs than we can listen to in our lifetime, always old and always new.
Last year I traveled to Japan and went to Tower Records, a very famous record store in Tokyo, and wandered around for hours. When I saw all the vinyl, CDs and even cassettes, I just couldn’t help looking at them, touching their covers, touching their plastic cases, and then looking for anything I was interested in in the demo machines hanging on the wall racks next to them. When I buy a physical record, whether it’s vinyl, tape, or CD, there are actually a lot of important elements that will fascinate me beyond the music, such as the style of the record itself, the content of the lyrics booklet, the album cover and back cover, information about the making of the album, and so on. Often times, I can feel some of the thoughts that went into the making of the album in the design, and I have thoughts like, “That’s how this song was made,” or “That’s how it feels,” etc. This kind of physical interaction makes listening to the music more enjoyable. This kind of physical interaction makes listening to music more interesting. This is the kind of experience and value that music streaming can’t provide nowadays. I think the physical makes music more warm and aesthetic, rather than just listening to it.
Vinyl, cassette tapes and CDs used to be the dominant music storage medium, and it accompanied many people in their growing up process, and their music tastes, life interests and social activities would be closely linked with cassettes. Exchanging tapes, recording compilations for friends, and so on, were all unique cultural phenomena. Even after physical music dropped out of the mainstream, this phenomenon continues to this day. So I think that for many people, the love of physical music is not just nostalgia, it’s a window to a whole new experience for those who haven’t had access to physical records, and it’s even a new trend for young music fans now. How do we listen to music? Do we use only our ears? Or do we listen with our eyes and hands? I always believe that with one more dimension, our appreciation and feeling of music will have more moving possibilities.