History of Sound Recording and Playback

History:
Sound recording began in the mid 19th Century France, when Leon Scott invented his phonoautograph. Influenced by the rise of mechanical technology, he developed a hand operated horn which trapped sound, sending a vibration to a brush that would inscribe the wave onto a flat material. His phonoautograph was unable to be played back, rather creating a visual image of the captured sound. Later in 1877, Thomas Edison designed his phonograph. It worked similar to Scott's machine, although the phonograph wrote the wave onto a rotating cylinder which allowed for sound playback with the use of a needle and amplification. Sooner after in 1887, Emile Berliner mastered recording sound and playback with his invention of the gramophone. The gramophone cut a spiral grove into the surface of a rotating disk with a needle, and "its velocity changes in a pattern that is analogous to the original audio sine wave form." After, the wave is reconstructed by the playback device, be it an acoustical horn or any amplifier. Until the 1950's, audio signals were mechanically encoded directly onto the medium. From 1950 to the mid 1970's magnetic sound recording began to be explored by audio engineers and recording companies. Then in 1974, physicists Carl Haber and Vitaliy Fadeyeu developed digital sound recording. Utalizing their knowledge of reconstructive beam particle collisions, they optically scanned surfaces of a disk or cylinder and processed the resulting data digitally, avoiding all physical contact with the medium. They reconstructed the recordings in digital as 44.1 kHz, 16-bit WAV files, which today remain as the model for all qualitative sound recording.

Sound as a technology:
Sound, as a medium, is physical. It occupies space and as an object can be easily replicated and transported both analogy and digitally without loosing intrinsic value. Although once the digital movement of sound recording became the standard of capturing it, quality was easier to control due to the advancement of computer software and hardware. Sound recording and playback has taken on an important role in the social and political retrospective. As a tool, sound recording has launched cultural awareness (through music) as well as creating social genres (such as the 'iPod generation'). Due to digital sound recording, mp3s and their players have created mobile sonic escapes from reality, allowing the user to guide and label their daily lifestyle around recorded playlists.

Environment:
The production of contemporary sound recording and playback has entered a realm of a user-defined medium. Although high-end sound recording equipment remains in the hands of the wealthy, anyone is able to become a producer and receiver of sound. Sound remains autonomous, in that our existence as human beings control, alter and further its use as a technology and medium of artistic use. Furthermore, regardless of any hierarchy of sound recording and playback, "sound is instrinsically and unignorably relational: it emanates, propagates, communicates, vibrates, and agitates."

Works Cited:
Labelle, Brandon. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York: Continuum International, 2006. 1-316.

Public, General. "History of Sound Recording." Wikipedia. .

Teachout, Terry. "Why Listening Will Never Be the Same." Commentary Sept. 2002: 57-60. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Wilkinson, Scott. "In the Grove." Primedia Magazine Nov. 2004: 26+. Academic Search. EBSCO. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.