The Development of Technology Based Music 5 History Of Recording

Mechanical recording
The first devices for recording sound were mechanical in nature. In 1796 a Swiss watchmaker named Smooth Nikola described his idea for what we now call the cylinder musical box. This can be considered an early method of recording a melody, although it does not record an arbitrary sound and does not record automatically. "Playback" however is automatic. The Player piano was a device that could play back a piano performance which had earlier been mechanically recorded onto a piano roll.

The first recording and playback of sound waves used a rotating cylinder
In 1857, Leon Scott invented the 'phonoautograph', the first device to record arbitrary sound. It used a membrane (which vibrated in response to sound) attached to a pen, which traced a line roughly corresponding to the sound's waveform onto a roll of paper. Although able to record sound, the phonoautograph was unable to immediately play back the recording, although, in one laboratory experiment, a phonoautograph recording was photoengraved onto a metal plate, creating a groove, which was then played back.

The phonograph and the gramophone

The phonograph expanded on the principles of the phonoautograph. Invented by Thomas Edison in 1877, the phonograph was a device with a cylinder covered with a soft material such as tin foil, lead, or wax on which a stylus drew grooves. The depth of the grooves made by the stylus corresponded to change in air pressure created by the original sound. The recording could be played back by tracing a needle through the groove and amplifying, through mechanical means, the resulting vibrations. A disadvantage of the early phonographs was the difficulty of reproducing the phonograph cylinders in mass production.

The disk-based gramophone

This changed with the advent of the gramophone (phonograph in American English), which was patented by Emile Berliner in 1887. The gramophone imprinted grooves on the flat side of a disc rather than the outside of a cylinder. Instead of recording by varying the depth of the groove (vertically), as with the phonograph, the vibration of the recording stylus was across the width of the track (horizontally). The depth of the groove remained constant. Berliner 1

The Development of Technology Based Music 5 History Of Recording

called this audio disc a "gramophone record". Early disc recordings and phonograph cylinders had about the same audio fidelity (despite the cylinder's theoretical advantages of constant linear groove speed and greater dynamic range of the hill-and-dale groove geometry). However, disc records were easier and cheaper to mass produce. From the beginning, the flat disks were easily mass-produced by a molding process, pressing a master image on a plate of shellac. By 1902, successful molding processes for cylinder recordings were developed. The speed at which the disks were rotated was eventually standardized at 78 rpm. Later innovations allowed lower rotations: 45 and 33 rpm, and the material was changed to vinyl. Both phonograph cylinders and gramophone discs were played on mechanical devices most commonly hand wound with a clockwork motor. The sound was amplified by a cone that was attached to the diaphragm. The disc record fell into public favor quickly, and cylinders were not produced after 1929. The advent of electrical recording in 1925 drastically improved the quality of the recording process of disc records. Oddly, there was a period of nearly five years, from 1925 to 1930, when the premiere technology for home sound reproduction consisted of a combination of electrically recorded records with the specially-developed Victor Orthophonic phonograph, a spring-wound acoustic phonograph which used waveguide engineering and a folded horn to provide a reasonably flat frequency response. Electrically powered phonographs were introduced c. 1930, but crystal pickups and electronic reproduction did not become common until the late 1930s.

Magnetic recording
Magnetic recording was demonstrated in principle as early as 1898 by Valdemar Poulsen in his telegraphone. Magnetic wire recording, and its successor, magnetic tape recording, involve the use of a magnetizable medium which moves with a constant speed past a recording head. An electrical signal, which is analogous to the sound that is to be recorded, is fed to the recording head, inducing a pattern of magnetization similar to the signal. A playback head can then pick up the changes in magnetic field from the tape and convert it into an electrical signal. Early tape recorders were first developed in Germany. On Christmas day 1932 the British Broadcasting Corporation first used a tape recorder for their broadcasts.

7" reel of " recording tape, typical of audiophile, consumer and educational use in the 1950s-60s

The Development of Technology Based Music 5 History Of Recording

Magnetic tape recording as we know it today was developed in Germany during the late 1930s by the C. Lorenz company and by AEG. In 1938, S. J. Begun left Germany and joined Brush Development Company in the United States, where work continued but attracted little attention. Engineers at AEG, working with the chemical giant IG Farben, created the world's first practical magnetic tape recorder, the 'K1', which was first demonstrated in 1935. Development of magnetic tape recorders in the late 1940s and early 1950s is associated with the Brush Development Company and its licensee, Ampex; the equally important development of magnetic tape media itself was led by Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing corporation (now known as 3M).

Multitrack recording
The next major development in magnetic tape was multitrack recording, in which the tape is divided into multiple tracks parallel with each other. Because they are carried on the same medium, the tracks stay in perfect synchronization. The first development in multitracking was stereo sound, which divided the recording head into two tracks. First developed by German audio engineers ca. 1943, 2-track recording was rapidly adopted for modern music in the 1950s because it enabled signals from two or more separate microphones to be recorded simultaneously, enabling stereophonic recordings to be made and edited conveniently. (The first stereo recordings, on disks, had been made in the 1930s, but were never issued commercially.) Stereo quickly became the norm for commercial classical recordings and radio broadcasts, although many pop music and jazz recordings continued to be issued in monophonic sound until the mid1960s. Much of the credit for the development of multitrack recording goes to guitarist, composer and technician Les Paul, who also helped design the famous electric guitar that bears his name. His experiments with tapes and recorders in the early 1950s led him to order the first custom-built eight-track recorder from Ampex, and his pioneering recordings with his then wife, singer Mary Ford, were the first to make use of the technique of multitracking to record separate elements of a musical piece asynchronously that is, separate elements could be recorded at different times. Paul's technique enabled him to listen to the tracks he had already taped and record new parts in time alongside them. Multitrack recording was immediately taken up in a limited way by Ampex, who soon produced a commercial 3-track recorder. These proved extremely useful for popular music, since they enabled backing music to be recorded on two tracks (either to allow the overdubbing of separate parts, or to create a full stereo backing track) while the third track was reserved for the lead vocalist. Three-track recorders remained in widespread commercial use until the mid-1960s and many famous pop recordings including many of Phil Spector's socalled "Wall of Sound" productions and early Motown hits were taped on Ampex 3-track recorders. The next important development was 4-track recording. The advent of this improved system gave recording engineers and musicians vastly greater flexibility for recording and overdubbing, and 4track was the studio standard for most of the later 1960s. Many of the most famous recordings by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were recorded on 4-track, and the engineers at London's Abbey Road Studios became particularly adept at a technique called "reduction mixes" in the UK and "bouncing down" in the United States, in which multiple tracks were recorded onto one 43

The Development of Technology Based Music 5 History Of Recording

track machine and then mixed together and transferred (bounced down) to one track of a second 4-track machine. In this way, it was possible to record literally dozens of separate tracks and combine them into finished recordings of great complexity. All of the Beatles classic mid-60s recordings, including the albums Revolver and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, were recorded in this way. There were limitations, however, because of the build-up of noise during the bouncing-down process, and the Abbey Road engineers are still justly famed for the ability to create dense multitrack recordings while keeping background noise to a minimum. 4-track tape also enabled the development of quadraphonic sound, in which each of the four tracks was used to simulate a complete 360-degree surround sound. A number of albums including Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells were released both in stereo and quadrophonic format in the 1970s, but 'quad' failed to gain wide commercial acceptance. Although it is now considered a gimmick, it was the direct precursor of the surround sound technology that has become standard in many modern home theatre systems. In a professional setting today, such as a studio, audio engineers may use 24 tracks or more for their recordings, utilizing one or more tracks for each instrument played. The combination of the ability to edit via tape splicing, and the ability to record multiple tracks, revolutionized studio recording. It became common studio recording practice to record on multiple tracks, and mix down afterwards. The convenience of tape editing and multitrack recording led to the rapid adoption of magnetic tape as the primary technology for commercial musical recordings. Although 33 rpm and 45 rpm vinyl records were the dominant consumer format, recordings were customarily made first on tape, then transferred to disc, with Bing Crosby leading the way in the adoption of this method in the United States.

Further developments
Analog magnetic tape recording introduces noise, usually called "hiss", caused by the finite size of the magnetic particles in the tape. There is a direct tradeoff between noise and economics. Signalto-noise ratio is increased at higher speeds and with wider tracks, decreased at lower speeds and with narrower tracks. By the late 1960s, disk reproducing equipment became so good that audiophiles soon became aware that some of the noise audible on recordings was not surface noise or deficiencies in their equipment, but reproduced tape hiss. A few specialist companies started making "direct to disk" specialty recordings, made by feeding microphone signals directly to a disk cutter (after amplification and mixing). These recordings never became popular, but they dramatically demonstrated the magnitude and importance of the tape hiss problem. Prior to 1963, when Philips introduced the Compact audio cassette, almost all tape recording had used the reel-to-reel (also called "open reel") format. Previous attempts package the tape in a convenient cassette that required no threading met with limited success; the most successful was 8-track cartridge used primarily in automobiles for playback only. The Philips Compact audio cassette added much needed convenience to the tape recording format and a decade or so later had begun to dominate the consumer market, although it was to remain lower in quality to open reel formats.

The Development of Technology Based Music 5 History Of Recording

In the 1970s, advances in solid-state electronics made the design and marketing of more sophisticated analog circuitry economically feasible. This led to a number of attempts to reduce tape hiss through the use of various forms of volume compression and expansion, the most notable and commercially successful being several systems developed by Dolby Laboratories. The Dolby systems were very successful at increasing the effective dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratio of analog audio recording; to all intents and purposes, audible tape hiss could be eliminated. The original Dolby A was only used in professional recording. Successors found use in both professional and consumer formats; Dolby B became almost universal for the compact cassette, in prerecorded software, though subsequent forms, including Dolby C, were developed for home use.

Digital recording
In the 1980s, digital recording methods were introduced, and analog tape recording was gradually displaced, although it has not disappeared by any means. The first digital audio recorders were reel-to-reel decks introduced by companies such as Denon (1972), Soundstream (1979) and Mitsubishi. They used a digital technology known as PCM recording. Within a few years, however, many studios were using devices that encoded the digital audio data into a standard video signal, which was then recorded on a U-matic or other videotape recorder, using the rotating-head technology that was standard for video. A similar technology was used for a consumer format, Digital Audio Tape (DAT) which used rotating heads on a narrow tape contained in a cassette. DAT records at sampling rates of 48 kHz or 44.1 kHz, the latter being the same rate used on compact discs. Bit depth is 16 bits, also the same as compact discs. DAT was a failure in the consumer-audio field (too expensive, too finicky, and crippled by anti-copying regulations), but it became popular in studios (particularly home studios) and radio stations. A failed digital tape recording system was the Digital Compact Cassette (DCC). Within a few years after the introduction of digital recording, multitrack recorders (using stationary heads) were being produced for use in professional studios. In the early 1990s, relatively low-priced multitrack digital recorders were introduced for use in home studios; they returned to recording on videotape. The most notable of this type of recorder is the ADAT. The ADAT machine is still a very common fixture in professional and home studios around the world. In the consumer market, tapes and gramophones were largely displaced by the compact disc (CD) and a lesser extent the minidisc. These recording media are fully digital and require complex electronics to play back. Digital sound files can be stored on any computer storage medium. The development of the MP3 audio file format, and legal issues involved in copying such files, has driven most of the innovation in music distribution since their introduction in the late 1990s. As hard disk capacities and computer CPU speeds increased at the end of the 1990s, hard disk recording became more popular.

Technique
The earliest methods of recording sound involved the live recording of the performance directly to the recording medium. This was an entirely mechanical process, often called "Acoustical recording". The sound of the performers was captured by a diaphragm with the cutting needle 5

The Development of Technology Based Music 5 History Of Recording

connected to it. The needle made the groove in the recording medium. To make this process as efficient as possible the diaphragm was located at the apex of a cone and the performers would crowd around the other end. If a performer was too loud then they would need to move back from the mouth of the cone to avoid drowning out the other performers. In some early jazz recordings a block of wood was used in place of the bass drum. The advent of electrical recording made it possible to use microphones to capture the sound of the performance. The leading record labels switched to the electric microphone process in 1925, and most other record companies followed their lead by the end of the decade. Electrical recording increased the flexibility and sound quality. However, the performance was still cut directly to the recording medium, so if a mistake was made the recording was useless. Electrical recording made it more feasible to record one part to disc and then play that back while playing another part, recording both parts to a second disc. This is called over-dubbing. The first commercially issued records using over-dubbing were released by the Victor Talking Machine Company in the late 1920s. However overdubbing was of limited use until the advent of analog audio tape. Use of tape overdubbing was pioneered by Les Paul and is called 'sound on sound' recording. Studios thus could create recorded "performances" that could not be duplicated by the same artists performing live. The analog tape recorder made it possible to erase or record over a previous recording so that mistakes could be fixed. Another advantage of recording on tape is the ability to cut the tape and join it back together. This allows the recording to be edited. Pieces of the recording can be removed, or rearranged. See also audio editing, audio mixing, multitrack recording. The advent of electronic instruments (especially keyboards and synthesizers), effects and other instruments has led to the importance of MIDI in recording. For example, using MIDI timecode, it is possible to have different equipment 'trigger' without direct human intervention at the time of recording.

DAW DIGITAL AUDIO WORKSTATION

In more recent times, computers (DAW - digital audio workstation) have found an increasing role in the recording studio, as their use eases the tasks of cutting and looping, as well as allowing for instantaneous changes, such as duplication of parts, the addition of effects and the rearranging of parts of the recording.